Book news, reviews and recommendations
It’s always fun to try to predict what’s going to make it onto the Man Booker longlist but I think most people were caught out this year. Of my own predictions only Colum McCann’s Transatlantic made the grade so I thought it was time that I read another longlisted novel. Set against the backdrop of […]
Unexploded by Alison Macleod: A wartime marriage under strain Read More »
Catherine O’Flynn’s new novel comes with the kind of bright and breezy jacket that makes you want to pick it up plus a recommendation from Jonathan Coe praising her writing to the skies. Expectations were high, then, for this story of a father and son viewing each others’ lives uncomprehendingly across the chasm of misunderstandings,
Mr Lynch’s Holiday by Catherine O’Flynn: A novel with heart and humour Read More »
When I was a reviews editor I tried my best to make sure that translators were credited in the bibliographic information that accompanies reviews. It didn’t always work: sometimes space was tight and the sub-editors had to cut the copy but sometimes the fact that it was a translated work was not immediately apparent. Perhaps
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (transl. Carol Brown Janeway) Lost in Translation Read More »
Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel of such intensity that I had to put it down every so often just to catch my breath and anchor myself in my own comfortable world. Written in lyrical often dreamlike prose, it takes us into the mind of Jacqueline who has fled the rebel
A Measure to Marker Drift by Alexander Maksik: Makes you thank your lucky stars Read More »
Visitation Street opens in a steamy Brooklyn heat wave. Two fifteen year-old-girls decide to escape their stultifying boredom, floating off into the bay’s greasy waters on a bright pink inflatable raft watched by two young men. Only one girl returns, washed up under the pier and in bad shape. The rest of the novel explores
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda: More The Killing than Karin Slaughter Read More »
Hard to beat the satisfaction of reading a book you’ve been looking forward to for months and finding it to be even better than your sky high expectations. I’ve been eagerly anticipating Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore ever since I spotted it in Atlantic’s catalogue way back in January. Set in the near future, it playfully
Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan: Satisfaction Guaranteed Read More »
From the opening paragraph of Gail Godwin’s Flora we know that things will end badly. Helen, now a writer, looks back to the summer of 1945 when she turned eleven. Her father has gone to work at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for what is later revealed to be the Manhattan Project, leaving Helen in the care
Flora by Gail Godwin: More Atonement than The Turn of the Screw Read More »
When a book arrives with a press release proclaiming its author to be the new Anne Tyler it sets off alarm bells. Tyler’s fans love her for her wryly witty observations on social manners. Her novels are filled with the kind of characters her readers recognise in themselves, their families and friends. It’s much to
Things We Need by Jennifer Close: If you like Anne Tyler… Read More »
J. Courtney Sullivan writes the kind of long involving books into which you can comfortably sink, surfacing now and again for a cup of tea or whatever you fancy. I thoroughly enjoyed her previous novel, Maine; intelligently written and completely absorbing. The Engagements is structured around the idea of the engagement ring, a ‘tradition’ apparently
The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan: A brightly polished gem Read More »
After a disappointing start, it seems I’m back on a reading roll this month – What in God’s Name, Lamb, The Small Hours, The Last Banquet and now, Ethan Hauser’s The Measures Between Us, have all hit the spot. Set against the backdrop of a storm-hit small town just outside Boston, it opens with a
The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser: An impressive, eloquently melancholy novel Read More »
Purely coincidentally, I’ve been reading N. M. Kelby’s White Truffles in Winter about the last days of the celebrated chef Escoffier alongside Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet, set in pre-Revolutionary France. Both are about Frenchmen with a passion for food who love and admire women, both have recipes scattered through them and both men are