Cover image for Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’

That subtitle isn’t a quote from Sebastian Barry’s new novel – as some of you may have spotted, it’s the opening line from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier – but it’s the phrase that came into my head many times while reading it. Set in mid-1990s Ireland, Old God’s Time follows a recently retired

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Cover image for Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery: ‘I could become someone of my own invention’  

I would have been keen to read Nicole Flattery’s first novel anyway, having enjoyed her excellent short story collection, Show Them a Good Time, but its premise is intriguing. In 1967, two young high school students helped transcribe tapes of conversations and monologues made by Andy Warhol’s coterie on which he based A Novel. Flattery’s

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Blasts from the Past: A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (1990)

This is 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 into as many hands as I could. Friends are the new family has become something of a contemporary cliché. Perhaps its origins lie in the

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Cover image for The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Paperbacks to Look Out For in March 2023: Part Two

The second batch of March’s paperbacks kicks off with one that demands a bit of concentration. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House explores the fallout from a technology that captures our very consciousness through a series of narratives connected by characters all linked to Bix Boulton, the software’s creator. No brief synopsis comes close to encapsulating

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Cover image for I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: ‘The wheels of justice came off the wagon a long time ago’    

I’ve yet to get around to reading Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, but I enjoyed both The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House so put up my hand for a copy of her new novel. I Have Some Questions for You follows Bodie who never felt she fit in at Granby, the boarding school

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Cover image for With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton

With or Without Angels by Dennis Bruton: A beautiful and original response to art

I was intrigued by the blurb for Douglas Bruton’s brief novella, With or Without Angels, which described the book as ‘a response through fiction’ to ‘The New World’ an artwork by the late artist Alan Smith, itself a response to the eighteenth-century artist Giandomenico Tiepolo’s ‘Il Mondo Nuovo’. In his acknowledgements, Bruton explains that after

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