A fire engulfs and destroys a house in Connecticut, killing June Reid’s daughter and her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend. Instead of celebrating the marriage of her daughter, which had been planned for that very day, June is faced with unimaginable grief and loss. Literary agent-turned-writer Bill Clegg starts his first full-length novel Read More
In the running for this year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction was Nigerian author and Professor of Creative Writing; Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen. Written whilst experiencing a period of home-sickness as a college student in Cyprus, Obioma’s novel is a dense and impactful tale which hosts myriad themes, not least the matter Read More
Lynne Alexander’s debut novel The Sister is a fictionalised telling of the life of Alice James, the younger sister of two famous brothers: the writer, Henry James, and the philosopher, William James. An invalid with a condition that no doctor can seem to diagnose, Alice spends most of her life confined to bed, where she Read More
Last autumn, I asked Kei Miller for the names of contemporary Jamaican writers he thought I ought to read. The first name on his lips was Marlon James. I bought The Book of Night Women and A Brief History of Seven Killings, but as is the way of many good intentions, both titles overwintered unread Read More
Sanjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways could not have been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize at any better a moment than in the current political climate. Sahota’s political novel outlines the lives of three Indian migrant workers and Narinder, an Indian-British woman fighting her own personal battle between morals and abiding by the Read More
At a time when dystopian futures are a young adult novel’s game, Anna Smaill’s The Chimes rises from the ashes of teen love triangles and marketable trilogies as an original take on what has recently become an oversaturated genre. Edging more towards the book burning likeness of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Smaill secures an older demographic Read More
This complex novel, longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, is set in Ireland and various global locations. It tracks the progress, spanning three decades, of a family of four siblings, and their relationship with their mother Rosaleen. Enright won the Man Booker in 2007 with The Gathering, a novel described by one reviewer as Read More
A Little Life seems to be the favourite to win the 2015 Booker Prize. But before allowing it to be celebrated as the great gay American novel everyone’s been waiting for (as some have), the following observations may be relevant.. Jude, abandoned as a newborn, grows up in care and is serially sexually abused by Read More
Despite the old adage, it is difficult to avoid being influenced by a books cover. With its open colour wheel, composed of eleven segments that transition from red through to violet, the last two of which are coated in a glossy coat of dripping oil, the minimalist design of Satin Island’s hardback edition gives little away. Intrigued, Read More
Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel Lila re-visits the characters and setting of her previous novels, Pulitzer prize winning Gilead, and Orange prize winning Home. The narrative follows the meandering and often dark thoughts of the main protagonist, Lila, the much younger wife of John Ames, the Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead in Iowa. Read More