How do we measure our success today? When do we know our lives have been fully lived? Amidst the noise of constant communication, what does it mean to whisper? Rachel Elliot’s cacophony of social anxiety throws these questions in our lethargic faces. Whispers through a Megaphone is the author’s debut in the written word. She Read More
The Anatomist’s Dream comes with impressive recommendations. It was long listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year, and nominated for the Man Booker prize in 2015, when it lost out to A Brief History of Seven Killings. Clio Gray, the novelist and short story writer, is known to create worlds set in Read More
In the endnotes of New York Drawings, Adrian Tomine asserts that he is a cartoonist, “not just an illustrator.” However, it is precisely that tension between those two artistic identities that define Tomine’s work. Indeed, his two most recent publications, New York Drawings and Killing and Dying, emphasise his versatility, demonstrating that, in spite of Read More
If you like post-apocalyptic novels, then this is the book for you. If you like them very gory and brutal, then this is not the book for you. Even the deaths are gentle. Russell himself said that, although he had a ‘‘fascination with Armageddon,’’ he ‘’wanted to devise one…based on human technology rather than something Read More
Ahmet Altan is a murderer. At least, he is in the eyes of the unnamed, enigmatic narrator who, having recently taken a life, spends his own final hours musing about the relationships between God, an author, and his characters. Part existentialist essay and part murder mystery, Endgame is a story that slowly but surely draws Read More
Lindsay Parnell’s debut novel Dogwood is not for the faint hearted. The novel begins with the main protagonist, Harper, writing a letter to her younger brother Job telling him about the execution of Tara Hackett, a murderer whom she met in prison. The explicit descriptions of violence and sheer horror presented serve as a warning. Read More
Jackie Copleton’s first novel is ambitious in its themes and in the spread of history it encompasses: A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is set mainly in Nagasaki across the years before, during and after the dropping of the atomic bomb. The plot revolves around Amaterasu, a mother and grandmother, whose desperate search to find her Read More
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a startlingly vivid and rich narrative recounting the story of Zimbabwean death row inmate Memory, or Mnemosyne. Through meticulously interweaving and patching a gamut of memories together to form a story, Gappah’s debut novel simultaneously evokes feelings of intrigue, pathos, wonder and hope. The early isolation of Memory informs Read More
Sometimes there is irony in a book’s appearance and format. This ‘Little Red Book’ is not a collection of quotes by Chairman Mao, but a novel that echoes the great American jazz-age classic, The Great Gatsby. The (anti?) hero in this case is Roman Gorsky, a billionaire Russian oligarch who has settled in London, during Read More
A journalist and published poet, Ukrainian writer Liubov Holota became a Shevchenko Laureate after receiving the Shevchenko Premier for her debut novel Episodic Memory. Framed by the forty day vigil for her dead mother, the novel sets up vignettes of one woman’s childhood in the Ukrainian Steppe in the 1950s. Holota’s novel is fully transportive Read More