Fiction

Action Packed

The general plot of a thriller involving terrorists is well known: the terrorists have an gruesome scheme in the works while an FBI/CIA/MI5 agent races to uncover the plan and capture the terrorists before their horrific plan is executed. In...

Grey stones lapped by a freezing sea

Two major events were happening in Scotland in 1843: one religious, and one agricultural. On the religious front, a bitter schism erupted in the Church of Scotland, where evangelicals fiercely opposed control of the church by landowners split off to...

Desire and suspicion

This novel will probably stand out in my mind as one of those with the most explicit writing on lesbian sexual intercourse. Some of the descriptions run on for pages, in great detail. It is a novel set in Overijssel,...

Witch trials

This novel set in a small village in Scotland, Kilgoyne, featuring the protagonist, Majorie Crowe, whom the villagers think is between 60 and 70 years of age, “They think me to divorced or a lifelong spinster, that I used to...

Cat’s Cradle

There have been so many Japanese books in translation available of recent years that I have ended up reading a good many myself, such as Sayata Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Meiko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs,  Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series of Before...

Oceanic Superpowers

Everything can be beautiful with the right eyes and ears. Every genre of music. Every sorrow and every pleasure. Every inhale and exhale. Every guitar solo. Every voice. Every plant beside the tarmac. If you find the above sentiment moving...

Joan is different, and that is just fine

I didn’t like the word indifferent either. It was just two letters off from the word that I hate. Joanna, the protagonist in Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, has similarities to this same author’s protagonist in Rental House. Both protagonists...

Medical Injustice

““When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt in my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (p141). These are the words of Dr Civil Townsend, in 2016 when she is already...

Politically mixed marriages

Elizabeth Harris’ first novel has an unusual pair of main characters: a long-married gay married couple in New Jersey, one of whom has drifted politically rightwards over the years and now decides to run for Congress as a Republican. His...

An unexpected and disturbing visitor

Into the mundanity and trudge of Sam’s and Elena’s lives comes a bear.  Sam and Elena live in San Juan with this ailing mother in a increasingly dilapidated house. Since Sam was 16 and Elena 18, they have been taking...