Book news, reviews and recommendations
I started the first batch of March titles by mentioning two big books to look out for. The first was Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood about which I have my doubts, the second is Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time which blew my socks off. Set in mid-90s Ireland, it follows a recently retired, widowed police officer …
Books to Look Out For Out for in March 2023: Part Two Read More »
The second batch of January paperbacks starts with two novels that take swipes at social media, both of which I’ve read. Set in 2016 with Trump freshly elected, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts follows an unnamed narrator, shocked to find her apparently liberal boyfriend is running a popular conspiracy theory website, taking herself off to Berlin …
Paperbacks to Look Out for in January 2022: Part Two Read More »
By March I’d usually have been talking about spring but even my perennial Pollyanna tendencies had been flattened by a pandemic winter, dank and dreary with few bright days to enjoy. One of the novels that kept my mind of things was Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground which explores the darker side of rural life through …
I’d not read anything by Danielle Evans before The Office of Historical Corrections turned up, although the title of her prize-winning, Before You Suffocate your Own Fool Self, had caught my eye. This second collection comprises seven stories, one lengthy enough to qualify as a novella, which explore racism in America and its complicated history. …
A healthy two-parter preview for March with a wide range of books to look out for including several I’ve already read beginning with Alexis Schaitkin’s enjoyable Saint X, a casualty of last year’s slipping and sliding in the publishing schedules. A little outside my usual literary territory as you can probably tell from that cover, …