The cityscape of Cork, in which Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies finds itself unfolding, is a paradoxical M.C. Escheresque backdrop. This is the debut of a seasoned and celebrated blogger, the ‘sweary-lady’ (as McInerney titles herself), and while her first expedition into extended prose fiction comes with a few teething problems, the novel finds itself Read More
Shocking, harrowing, deeply disturbing, but beautifully imagined and described, Cynthia Bond’s novel Ruby will haunt you long after you put it down. It is essentially a love story set in small town America with many twists and turns, but it is in no way conventional. The love isn’t only between a man and a woman, Read More
A graduate of Northwestern University, Attica Locke was a Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab. She has been a scriptwriter for Paramount, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO and Dreamworks, and is currently a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. Locke’s focus is African-American cultural and political history and her 2010 Read More
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a science-fiction novel set in a distant future where humans have reached out beyond our solar system and joined the larger galactic community. It follows the interspecies crew of the industrial ship Wayfarer as they seek their fortune building a wormhole highway to a mysterious and Read More
At Hawthorn Time is a narrative of belonging and identity, wrapped up in an elegiac homage to the natural world. It is the second novel of Melissa Harrison, a freelance writer and occasional photographer who lives in South London. She won the John Muir Trust’s ‘Wild Writing’ Award in 2010 and was a Writer In Residence at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, in January Read More
“A ‘companion’ piece rather than a sequel’, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins moves from the perspective of Ursula Todd in the critically acclaimed and highly popular Life After Life to that of Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy. Having expected not to have survived his stint as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, 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
Following on from her previous novel The Midwife’s Daughter, Patricia Ferguson returns to the sleepy Cornish town of Silkhampton to tell the story of both new and also some familiar characters. Set in the early 1930s, the book revolves around three women, all widely different but drawn together by circumstance into a situation which will Read More