Book news, reviews and recommendations
I have a weakness for Irish fiction. It’s often characterised by a restrained clarity – beautiful, elegant prose with a yearning quality about it – or at least the work of authors I favour fits that description. Colm Tóibín, John McGahern, William Trevor, Ann Enright, Deirdre Madden all come to mind and after reading When […]
When Light is Like Water by Molly McCloskey: Love in all its complexity Read More »
Whereas a family theme – conventional or otherwise – ran through the first installment of June’s paperback preview, this one’s much more of a hodge-podge. Given the time of year, a book aimed fairly and squarely at the summer reading market seems as good a place to start as any. Invincible Summer has a structure
Paperbacks to Look Out for in June 2017: Part Two Read More »
This is the first English language novel I’ve read from Pushkin Press, a publisher of whom I’m very fond. Their books are often a little out of the way: Hiromi Kawakami’s dreamlike Record of a Night Too Brief, Auđur Ava Ólafsdóttir’s wacky Butterflies in November and Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal with its out-of-step protagonist,
The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips: Out-Kafkaing Kafka Read More »
Sometimes I read for the storytelling, sometimes for the writing. With The End We Start From I suspected it was going to be the latter – Megan Hunter is a poet and in my experience poets often write beautifully crafted novels. The book also sounded as if it fell into dystopian territory, something I usually
The End We Start From: Megan Hunter: Hopes springs eternal Read More »
There’s a fair old mix of attention-snagging titles published in paperback this June. I’ll start with one that was hotly anticipated in hardback: Peter Ho Davies’ The Fortunes, his first novel since the much-lauded The Welsh Girl back in 2007. Spanning 150 years, Davies’ novel explores the Chinese-American experience through the lens of four characters:
Paperbacks to Look Out for in June 2017: Part One Read More »
I’m not sure how I managed to miss Dominic Smith’s novel last year, although the hardback edition’s jacket is somewhat off-putting. In his author’s note Smith tells his readers that the eponymous Sara is loosely based on one of the first women to be admitted to St Luke’s Guild in the 17th-century Netherlands, explaining that
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith: Art and fakery Read More »
Who could resist that cover? Even before I had an idea of what it was about I knew I’d pick this one up in a bookshop. One look at it tells you that the myth of Leda and the Swan has to be in there somewhere even if you don’t – and I didn’t –
Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone: Lost in the wilderness Read More »
Top of my list for June is Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends which I’m pretty sure isn’t aimed at my age group but sounds enticing all the same. Four friends in their twenties talk about everything under the sun but it’s Frances and her affair with a much older married man who eventually takes centre
Books to Look Out for in June 2017 Read More »
All That’s Left to Tell caught my eye on Twitter – just a few tweets, nothing shouty but it sounded intriguing. Two people tell each other stories: one is a hostage, the other a female interrogator who visits him at night after he’s been blindfolded by his guards. These are the bare bones of Daniel
All That’s Left to Tell by Daniel Lowe: Stories within stories Read More »
The first time H and I went to Croatia was just after the end of the war, 1996 or thereabouts. I remember being annoyed with the travel agent (that’s the way we did things in those days) who advised me not to go to a country where there was a war on despite the fact
A Week in Split and Two Books Read More »
Back from sunny Split – more of which later in the week – with the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. If you’re a regular visitor to
Blasts from the Past: Plainsong by Kent Haruf (1999) Read More »