Book news, reviews and recommendations
It was its structure that attracted me to Ore Agbaje-Williams’ debut. Set over one day, The Three of Us is told from three points of view: a wife, a husband and the best friend who has known the wife since school. Lots of room there for unreliable narrators and tense relationship dynamics. She was the […]
June’s second batch of paperbacks begins with two novels by Irish writers, one of which I’ve read the other, the other I’m keen to read. Opening with a beginning and an end Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island follows four generations of women in one unconventional household. Left to bring up her daughter alone,
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I was delighted to spot Sheila Armstrong’s first novel in the publishing schedules having been so impressed with her short story collection, How to Gut a Fish. That had a touch of the surreal about it which I half expected from Falling Animals, given it’s slightly disconcerting, rather lovely cover, but Armstrong’s novel is not
Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong: For those in peril on the sea Read More »
I finally got around to reading Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Costa First Novel Prize-winning Open Water just before putting my hand up for a copy of Small Worlds. Like many bloggers I follow, I was very taken with it. Hard to imagine that Small Worlds would be better but, for me, it was. Beginning in 2010,
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson: A place of safety and love Read More »
June’s first instalment of paperbacks begins with three novels about which I had my doubts although after reading the first, it ended up on my books of 2022 list. I should have had more faith in Miriam Toews’ ability to overcome the pitfalls of child narration, something I usually avoid like the plague. Fight Night
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Having enjoyed Sarah Gilmartin’s exploration of grief and family dynamics, Dinner Party, a couple of years ago I was keen to read Service. Even more so when I found it was set in a restaurant. Gilmartin’s second novel follows a celebrity chef faced with a reckoning, his wife who has chosen not to examine his
Service by Sarah Gilmartin: Three sides to a story Read More »
Roland Schimmelpfennig’s clever, smartly structured One Clear Ice-cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century was one of my books of 2018. Set in Berlin’s underworld, Liminal is very different but it also explores the darker side of modern Germany, following a cop whose life has been shattered by a tragic event. Sometimes,
I’m kicking off this second instalment of June’s new fiction with a novel by a writer whose debut had a great deal of prepublication attention. I much prefer Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans to Real Life but perhaps all that brouhaha had raised my expectations unrealistically high. Reading like a series of intricately linked short stories,
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At first glance the blurb for Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane didn’t appeal with its mention of squash courts but it’s published by one of my favourite imprints so when it popped through my letterbox, I decided to give it a try. Maroo’s quietly perceptive debut follows a family, paralysed by grief and an inability to
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo: A grief observed Read More »
Freelancing can be a lonely pursuit, the attraction of completing your work swiftly, free of interruptions from colleagues passing the time of day, wearing thin. It’s something I learnt to find a way round when working from home was more of a rarity than it is post-covid. It’s that experience that attracted me to Phoebe
Temper by Phoebe Walker: A year of loneliness Read More »
June’s new fiction begins with two novels from what seems to be a never-ending stream of extremely talented Irish women writers, the first distinctly urban, the second rural. Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident is a witty coming-of-age story about the eponymous Rachel and her gay friend, James, who share a dilapidated house in Cork in
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