Book news, reviews and recommendations
The second instalment of May’s new fiction begins with a novel by one of my favourite writers. Sarah Moss’s Ripeness sees a woman in her seventies remembering the months she spent in Italy as a seventeen-year-old in the 1960s. Edith is the child of a Derbyshire hill farmer and a refugee whose family disappeared in […]
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I’m starting off the first instalment of May’s fiction with two novels I’ve already read the first of which is Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt. Largely set in an alternate version of 1979, close to reality but unsettlingly different, it follows a set of thirteen-year-old triplets living in a children’s home in the New
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I’m beginning with the only one I’ve read from this second instalment of April paperbacks. Narrated by the self-deprecating Rocky, Catherine Newman’s Sandwich spans a week in the holiday let she and her husband have rented for almost twenty years. They and their grown-up children cram themselves into the tiny cottage, joined later by Rocky’s
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I’m kicking off April’s paperback preview with two favourites from last year beginning with Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road, the story of a missing girl and her parents, now divorced, who receive news decades after she disappeared. Yannick persuades Kathleen to travel to Vancouver, where Una had been living, to talk to the police. Although we
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There’s a coming-of-age theme running through the first few titles in April’s second fiction preview beginning with Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven which sees a deep bond form between two teenage boys. James is eager to begin his life away from the expectations of his family and the small village in which he lives. Luke has
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I’ve read two books from the first April preview instalment beginning with Solvej Balle’s International Booker Prize longlisted On The Calculation of Volume which is structured as a diary written by Tara, briefly in Paris for the antiquarian bookshop she runs with her husband. Nothing seems amiss until the following day begins to repeat itself.
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I’ve read just one from the second instalment of March paperbacks. Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece follows three American women of Chinese heritage who first meet in 1983, aged twelve, and maintain a connection into their seventies in a dystopian near future. Each of the friends has a lengthy narrative section charting the very different directions
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I’ve read all the titles in this first instalment of March paperbacks beginning with a 2024 favourite: Carys Davies’s Clear, set in 1843. Having impoverished himself and his wife by resigning his living to become a minister in the newly formed Free Church of Scotland, John Ferguson reluctantly accepts a lucrative offer preparing the clearance
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Back from Stockholm (more of which later in the week) with March’s second batch of new fiction. I’ve already read Theft, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Described as ‘one of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers’ by the chairman of the Nobel committee, Gurnah continues to explore that
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By March, spring is firmly in my sights with hopes for fine weather and outdoor get togethers although I know we’re a long way from that. In the meantime, there’s lots of interesting fiction to look out for. Natasha Brown’s debut, Assembly, was one of my books of 2021: a brief, astonishingly powerful novella about
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February’s second batch of paperbacks includes three I’ve already read, beginning with one likely to be a Marmite book with knobs on for many readers. One of my books of last year, Helen Oyeyemi’s inventive, playful Parasol Against the Axe follows a hen party which has descended on Prague, Oyeyemi’s beloved adopted home and the
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