A cult classic that lives up to the hype: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides ★★★★
In 1970’s American Suburbia, the Lisbon sisters start to kill themselves. This won’t be of any great shock based on the title, but trigger warnings abound. It starts with thirteen-year-old Cecilia, who after a failed attempt at slitting her wrists in the bath, succeeds in…
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Illuminating stories of tragedy and tenderness: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty ★★★★
The interconnected stories in Night of the Living Rez document in equal parts the bleakness and tenderness of life on the Penobscot Indian reservation in Maine, told through the eyes of our protagonist David. In a nonlinear structure, we meet David as a young boy,…
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Affecting stories of strength and struggle: Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia ★★★★
These heart-wrenching multi-generational stories are easy to get swept up in, but hard to read. Spanning cigar factories in pre-Independence war Cuba to migrant detention centres in Texas and suburban Floridian homes, these women of Cuban and Salvadoran descent have heavy, harrowing tales to tell.
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Illicit love and inescapable violence: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy ★★★★
It’s the mid-seventies in Northern Ireland, and sectarian violence is invading the lives of everyday people in a garrison town outside Belfast, home to our protagonist Cushla Lavery. A Catholic primary school teacher, Cusha lives a humdrum life at home with her alcoholic mother (reminiscent…
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Beating the backlist in 2023, AKA working my way through an out-of-control bookcase
Surveying my stacks of books that have now spilled out from the bookshelves and into piles, I decided it was time to participate in the Beat the Backlist Reading Challenge. As per the challenge, it is: ‘designed to help you tackle all the books you…
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Subversive and surreal short stories: Bliss Montage by Ling Ma ★★★★½
After reading Ling Ma’s Severance, one of my favourite books of 2020 (and I’ll be so bold as to say this decade), I was going to read whatever she published next. Bliss Montage is a surrealist collection of short stories narrated by Chinese-American women. One…
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The beginning of the apocalypse is here: Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam ★★★★
Two well-heeled Brooklynites, Amanda and Clay, have rented an Air Bnb in rural Long Island with their two adolescent children. Amanda overbuys at the supermarket, Clay smokes, the children swim in the pool. It’s an idyllic enclave, a place for them to ‘leave the world…
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Nightshift by Kiare Ladner: A piercing page-turner of obsession and reinvention ★★★★
We’re in London, just before the turn of the millennium. Meggie, a transplant from South Africa, works a ‘media monitoring’ job where she combs through the day’s news to summarize horrible crimes. It’s there that she is drawn into the orbit of her enigmatic colleague…
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Propulsive and unsettling literary suspense: Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka ★★★★½
The hours are ticking down until Ansel Packer’s execution. And as he awaits his grim fate – in passages ingeniously told in second-person present, making it impossible to look away – the story of how he comes to be sitting on death row in a Texas prison…
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Yellowface by R. F. Kuang – a deliciously dark satire on the publishing world ★★★★★
June Hayward is desperate for success as an author. She’s longing to achieve that perfect trifecta of huge commercial gains accompanied by high-profile literary prizes and a legacy on literature for generations to come. So the sudden death of literary darling Athena Liu, leaving behind…
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Sharp social commentary on a city in flux – Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley ★★★★
Mozley’s London is sprawling, humming, in constant flux – and home to a cast list of of down-and-out addicts, property developers, villainous heiresses, aspiring actors, ex-hitmen…It’s a melting pot in the true sense of the word. And the focus around which this multi-layered plot spins…
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Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, where a translator navigates language and power ★★★★½
We don’t know much about our protagonist. All we do know is that she’s somewhat of a rootless individual, who has recently moved to the Hague to translate at the criminal court. Despite the first-person perspective and the intimacy of seeing the world through her…
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Desire and danger in razor-sharp campus novel Vladimir by Julia May Jonas ★★★★
This is a blistering, subversive, unputdownable read. Which really, you should be able to tell from the cover version with the half-naked man.
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5 literary fiction reads for AAPI heritage month
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. I’m going to be doing a mini-series on books I’ve loved by AAPI authors in different genres, and coming up first are my favourite lit fic reads – to be enjoyed any time of the year!…
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Book review: ‘Burntcoat’ by Sarah Hall – art and love in the shadow of a deadly virus ★★★★
There’s something unsettling about reading a moment in history as that moment is still happening. There’s not the perspective that comes from distance from the event having passed, it feels all a bit too close to home. Thankfully (I suppose?) the virus ravaging Sarah Hall’s…
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Book review: ‘How High We Go In The Dark’ by Sequoia Nagamatsu – dazzling, devastating stories from a plague-ridden world ★★★★
I had to take a break from plague books in early 2020. But here I am again.
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Book review: ‘Girl A’ by Abigail Dean – a transfixing story of rebuilding a life after horror ★★★★½
I almost stopped reading this book a few pages in. But I’m glad I didn’t.
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Book review: A kaleidoscopic portrait of growing up the daughters of immigrants in ‘Brown Girls’ by Daphne Palasi Andreades ★★★★
Welcome to the ‘dregs of queens’, a place where the ‘brown girls’ of the title are born to immigrant families from all over the world, who landed in New York in pursuit of the elusive American Dream. From young girlhood to teenagehood to adulthood and…
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10 books on my winter 2021 TBR
Here’s another overly-optimistic list to see me through the dark winter months. ‘A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse–one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.’ ‘A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital…
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Six Degrees of Separation: Shirley Jackson to Lisa Taddeo
The starting book for this month is The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. I’d never heard of this short, frightening story – which caused an absolute uproar when published the 1940s in the New Yorker. So of course I had to see what all the fuss was…
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Top 10 Tuesday | Books on my autumn 2021 TBR
I think by now I’ve come to accept that I don’t have the dedication to read all the books I optimistically put on a TBR. Shiny new books pop up on my radar and distract me; life gets in the way. But as I’ve mentioned…
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Book Review | The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
It’s not very often that a novel makes me weep, but this did it.
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Book Review | The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr
It’s hard to know where to start with a book like this; a book so unflinching and devastating that it’s definitely not one I would recommend to everybody. So I better start with a warning: this isn’t for the fainthearted, and content warnings abound in…
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4 upcoming releases I’m excited for
It’s a funny old time. Not much is known for certain – I’m finding it hard to think much beyond the next 2 months! But in this great age of uncertainty, I find it comforting to know that there are new book releases on the horizon…
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Book Review | Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
It’s 2012, and a directionless young girl falls head over heels in love with a troubled boy. If this feels like a familiar set up to me, surely it’s my own fault for gravitating to the same millennial relationship stories of woe. But here we…
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Top 10 Tuesday | Books on my Summer 2021 TBR
Summer TBR? It feels like I just wrote my Spring TBR (and let’s not talk about the fact that I only finished 4 of the 10 and DNF’d 2…) but I can’t resist a list, so here goes… I can’t even pick what I’m most…
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Book Review | Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
Kambili and her brother, Jaja, live in the beautiful but stifling confines of their family home in Enugu, Nigeria. On the surface a life of privilege – they have a driver, a housekeeper and attend a prestigious school – their life at home is anything but…
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Book Review | Summerwater by Sarah Moss
Families at a remote Scottish cabin park are stuck inside on the longest day of the summer, while the rain hammers down. You haven’t experienced a proper British childhood if you didn’t spend at least one summer holiday in a perpetual rain-soaked, chilled-to-the-bone state. And…
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Book Review | Human Acts by Han Kang
It’s 1980, and a country has turned against its people. In Gwangju, South Korea, Dong-ho staffs the municipal gymnasium, tending to the bodies of the dead. “Apparently all the dead will be brought here from now on,” he is told. “They say there’s no room…
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Book Review | Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
The world of Fake Accounts is our world four years ago – a world on the brink of Trump’s election that is ‘ending, or would begin to end soon.’ It’s a world that feels both frantic and desperate but – or perhaps this is why –…
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Book Review | Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This immersive, expansive and moving story begins in a coastal town in early nineteenth-century Korea, shortly after the Japanese annexation of the country. Hoonie, the disabled son of a fisherman, is married to fifteen-year-old Yangjin, and together they raise their daughter Sunja while running a…
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Book Review | Luster by Raven Leilani
Buckle your seatbelts for a wry, painful, immersive, smart and introspective ride. Edie is a Black woman in her early twenties living in New York, working in publishing where she has just one other Black female colleague. ‘We both graduated from the school of Twice…
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Book Review | Little Gods by Meng Jin
Liya is born on the last night of the infamous Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in Beijing, on June 4th, 1989. Her mother is the enigmatic and ambitious theoretical physicist Su Lan, a woman with ‘an extraordinary mind.’ Her father, Li Yongzong, vanishes into the night.…
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Book Review | My Year of Rest & Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Well, if that wasn’t one twisted ride, I don’t know what is. Our unnamed narrator is a Columbia graduate in the early 2000s, a spoilt New Yorker who is living comfortably of her family’s wealth. She becomes an orphan, quits her job, severs ties and…
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Book Review | Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
The narrator of Topics of Conversation is acerbic, witty, dark. In a fragmentary narrative, we are guided – or perhaps pulled – through a 17-year period of her life, as seen through a fragmentary series of conversations. We get the impression that she’s excavating her inner life,…
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Book Review | Weather by Jenny Offill
Weather hums with a persistent, underlying anxiety. The hum is ‘in the air’, Lizzie remarks, a PhD dropout and now librarian who answers doomsday emails from listeners to a climate change podcast. And it’s the affliction of modern life, the interior and exterior concerns running…
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Book Review | When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
Christopher Banks is born in early twentieth century Shanghai to British parents. Growing up in the international quarter, sequestered from the somewhat shadier side of Shanghai life, he wiles away the hours with his Japanese best friend, Akira. Both of them vow to never leave…
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Book Review | Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
It’s small town Ohio in the seventies, and Marilyn and James Lee wake up one morning to find their most beloved daughter, Lydia, missing. Soon after, her fragile body will be dragged from the lake, and nothing will ever be the same again. Marilyn and…
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