Grace and Courage
~ The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve ~ We start this novel with Grace and Gene in a pretty little house on the coast of Maine, with their toddler Clare and baby Tom. It seems a perfect little family...
Upscale navel-gazing
~ All Adults Here, by Emma Straub ~ This is not an ambitious, sweeping novel. It is a small story set in a small place: Clapham, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, an essentially well-to-do little town, the kind of place...
Colonial Singapore
~ Tanamera, by Noel Barber ~ When I first saw this title, I didn’t recognise it straightaway, being more accustomed to reading it as 2 separate words: ‘Tanah Merah” – Merah is red, and Tanah is soil, land, even territory....
Survival and Resilience
~ Little Family, by Ishmael Beah ~ Somewhere in Africa, in a clearing on the edge of a small town, a boy sits among the grasses, motionless, unresponsive, looking into the distance. When you look again to where the boy...
Biting Satire
~ At Last, by Edward St Aubyn ~ This is the last book in Melrose series, based on the dysfunctional, charming, devastated and devastating Patrick Melrose. The cover blurb calls it a “masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional...
Enigmas
~ The Unseen World, by Liz Moore ~ The first few pages of The Unseen World suggest a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances. Ada is 13, living in Boston with her father, a dedicated intellectual...
Grief and Redemption
~ LaRose, by Louise Erdrich ~ As with all good writing, each novel in Erdrich’s Justice trilogy can stand on its own. Set in and around a Native American reservation in North Dakota, they are loosely linked stories featuring an...
The Food of Love
~ The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce ~ Another charming love story from Rachel Joyce (author of the Harold Fry and Queenie novels, and Perfect), this time, set within the backdrop of music. Frank is our protagonist, a large, dear...
Quarantine Art
Limited sources Quarantine stretches forward With weekends to fill. Slices of tree trunk. A grove of bamboo nearby. Calder-esque notions.
Understated Excellence
~ Abide With Me, by Elizabeth Strout ~ Even from the opening lines and pages of this novel, it was immediately clear why Elizabeth Strout has such an excellent reputation as a writer. The narrative is beautifully unfolded and paced,...
Dark Whimsy
~ Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi ~ Not an easy novel to slot into a genre, Gingerbread is a dense confection of magical realism, fairy tale (Grimm’s, definitely not the saccharine or sanitized kind), surrealism, and fantasy, with a talented, irrepressible...
Foster Care Indictment
~ My Name is Why, by Lemn Sissay ~ This novel is an indictment of the children’s foster care and care services in UK. Sissay tells the story of how he was taken away as a baby from his Ethiopian...
Tribal Threads
~ The Round House, by Louise Erdrich ~ Joe Coutts is an only child in an unusually (by his description) stable and happy Indian (Native American) family on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. His mother parses the bloodlines and...
A sassy, articulate, intelligent, flighty woman
~ Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams ~ Queenie Jenkins is a young black woman (2nd generation Jamaican) from south London (the geography is important to her) working in journalism (The Daily Read, culture section) in London. London’s multiculturalism and segregation are...
Abduction ripples through a community
~ Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips ~ This riveting novel starts with two young girls on a beach, occupying themselves while their mother is at work. Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s...
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