In a recent interview for The Guardian Valeria Luiselli complained that we demand too little of the novel as readers or students of the form. In upholding “relatability” and “empathy” as praiseworthy qualities, we mistake what are entry level virtues for the high bar. It goes without saying then that this is an ambitious book. Read More
Freshwater follows the life of Ada, narrated by the gods who inhabited her at birth. What could be seen as a cluster of psychiatric disorders is depicted instead as a spiritual struggle of finding one’s way in the world, all happening in Ada’s head, in the marble room where all her selves are contained. Akwaeke Read More
Swan Song is a historical work of fiction, and the first novel by Texan Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. It re-tells the fantastic life of Truman Capote, author of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. With a playful interception on the rigidity of biography, it is written in a thrilling collective voice, an ‘our’ which weaves collective memory Read More
Called on its cover ‘a novella in flash’, Bottled Goods follows on from Sophie Van Llewyn’s award-winning flash fiction pieces. This seems a clever move, allowing the author to mix different voices, tenses and forms, never allowing the reader to settle, and mirroring the increasingly jittery and fracturing nature of the life of Alina, the Read More
A modern revision of a classic Greek myth is no longer a unique concept. Perhaps this is thanks in part to Madeline Miller’s bestselling debut novel The Song of Achilles, which helped to popularise the idea. Nor is it especially original any more to give maligned women from popular stories ‘the Wicked treatment’, painting them Read More
Diana Evans’ third novel, Ordinary People, dives deep into the domestic. It revolves around the struggling marital lives of two thirty-something couples living in London with their children. Melissa and Michael were once electric together, full of adventure. Stephanie and Damien were perfect opposites. However, as time passes the couples find themselves ‘living in the Read More
This is the debut novel from Lillian Li, a graduate of the University of Michigan, whose previous work has been published in prestigious titles such as the New York Times and Granta. It is an intergenerational family saga set in a US Chinese restaurant. The restaurant’s speciality is Beijing Duck, the waiters even wearing “duck-patterned Read More
The moors of Northumberland remain wild. Despite the encroachment of pylons and roads, the bogs still hold secrets of the past and dangers in the present. Sarah Moss evokes the stark beauty of the moors in her sixth novel, Ghost Wall. In fewer than 150 pages, she weaves a tale of prejudices, cruelty, rage, mob Read More
In her second novel, Sally Rooney delivers a compelling love story set in the West of Ireland and grounded in the political realities of recent times. Normal People was hotly anticipated, well received, and continues to see Rooney lauded as a generational writer. Nevertheless, the passivity with which the millennial label is applied within critical Read More
Modern feminist revisions of Greek mythology are in vogue. Following Madeleine Miller’s feminist reworking of Homer’s Iliad (The Song of Achilles, 2012) and The Odyssey (Circe, 2018), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls also retells the story of The Iliad from a female perspective. Where Patroclus, Achilles’ steadfast companion, narrates Miller’s Trojan tale of Read More
