It seems to have taken me four decades of reading, to come on a startling realisation midway through this novel, exactly why I so value the imaginative, innovative, skillfully crafted writing styles when reading novels, above the pedestrian and prosaic...
A more topical novel can hardly be imagined, but it is actually mere coincidence that Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set during the 1918 (“Spanish Flu”) influenza pandemic. She started writing it in October 2018, “inspired by the centenary of...
The carer is 50 year old Mandy, from Solihull, with a Brummie accent, thick body, plain face, and no dress sense. She is working-class; which as Moggach would have it, watches daytime TV and goes to Nandos. She is hired...
1 stocky man who abuses his wife 1 small tender wife 1 medium-size tough woman in love with the wife 1 double-barrelled shotgun 1 small karoo town marinated in secrets 1 red-hot New Yorker 2 cool policemen 1 handful of...
I don’t read many Young Adult (YA) novels, but if they are this good, I need to read more! Am glad my book club chose this book because otherwise, I may not have read it, particularly given its subject matter...
~ Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez ~ Julia Alvarez writes wonderfully about Dominican immigrant families, and especially about the difficult, loving, annoying, funny parts of intra-family interactions. The bickering, affectionate relationship of her four first-generation immigrant sisters in How the Garcia...
~ The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller ~ Sue Miller’s novel follows two very different women who happen to live next door to one another in a university town. And their two very different marriages. Meri and Nathan are a...
~ Autumn, by Ali Smith ~ This is not going to be a plot-informed review, because this novel is not really about the plotline. Yes, I can tell you the protagonist is Elisabeth Demand, an art history lecturer, who lives...
Novels about biochemists are rare. Novels about gay black biochemists are surely nonexistent, until now; in this slender niche appears Real Life, a truly unusual first novel. Set over the course of a long weekend in an unnamed midwestern American...
~ The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel ~ Right from the outset, it is clear this is going to be a book with many hidden gems, and massive charm. It starts with Tomas decides to walk. p3 This...
Every novel by Tana French is a gem, but for me, Faithful Place has an edge over the rest. In her Dublin Murder Squad series of six books (so far), French specializes in crimes where one of the detectives has...
So slim that this volume is more novella than novel, this read is deceptively simple and yet packs in a wealth of social commentary about South Korean gender issues. This is a translated book, but happily the writing still does...
In spare, evocative prose, Mary Costello traces the life of her protagonist, Tess Lohan, from her childhood in Ireland through decades of her life in New York, and from a school-going child with a large clutch of siblings to a...
~ A Woman is no Man, by Etaf Rum ~ The title sounded promising, and so did the blurb of the storyline – about how Palestinians who had lost their homes or been driven out, and migrated to New York,...
The Goodreads Choice awards list landed in my inbox, and who can resist a list of books? (I had only read one: The Vanishing Half) The best debut novel was a novel I had not heard of, Such a Fun...
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