Susan Osborne

Cover image for Fulfillment by Lee Cole

Fulfillment by Lee Cole: ‘Despair and Late Capitalism’ or ‘The Hero’s Journey’

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Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping was one of my books of the year back in 2022 raising my expectations for his second. Fulfillment sees two half-brothers returning to Kentucky, one with his hopes dashed and in debt, the other married and apparently successful, teaching for a term at a local university. For anyone discomfited by that extra […]

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Cover image for Ripeness by Sarah Moss

Ripeness by Sarah Moss: ‘Life has no form, you don’t get to choose.’

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I was delighted when Sarah Moss’s Ripeness popped through my letter box. It’s the eighth book by her I’ve reviewed on this blog, starting way back in 2013 with her Icelandic memoir, Names for the Sea. This new one sees a woman in her seventies remembering the months she spent in Italy as a seventeen-year-old

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Cover image of for The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey: ‘Sometimes we lie to be kind.’  

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I’d been toying with reading The Book of Guilt for a while thanks to some very positive reviews on NetGallery but it was Laura’s comment about Catherine Chidgey on my New Zealand writers post that tipped the balance. Chidgey’s novel follows a set of triplets living in a children’s home in the New Forest, one

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Cover image for The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (transl. Ross Benjamin): In a bind

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I’ve read all six of Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novels and reviewed four on here, each of them very different from the others. The Director tells the story of film director G. W. Pabst who found himself trapped after the annexation of Austria, apparently with no choice but to produce films for Goebbels’s Ministry of

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Cover image for Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick

Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick: The end of the world as we know it

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I was a bit doubtful about Gethan Dick’s debut when it was pitched to me. Dystopian fiction doesn’t usually appeal but it’s published by Tramp Press, a small Irish indie whose books I’ve enjoyed in the past. Water in the Desert Fire in the Night follows a disparate group of people, neighbours on a London

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Cover image for Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

A Snapshot of My Reading #4

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This month’s snapshot includes a novel which disappointed several bloggers whose opinions I trust, a short story collection by an International Booker Prize longlisted author and a memoir by a museum guard. The novel I’m reading is Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual which I started yesterday so it’s early days. It begins with a devastating event

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