“Then using the dead as step-stools, I climbed out of the ground.” The protagonist of Sara Nović’s debut novel Girl at War is the beautifully-drawn tomboy narrator, Ana, who would be six years older than Nović herself. Unquestionably, this book’s research has not all been done from a library seat. In a search for more Read More
With Storms Gertrude and Imogen raging outside, Kim Leine’s The Prophets of Eternal Fjord has kept me going all winter. The biblical proportions of the book itself make it unwieldy, and trying to read it in bed feels suitably like an act of penance. Physical and mental hardship defines life in colonial Greenland in the Read More
With his first collection of short stories, Christos Tsiolkas is successful in looking with a new perspective at subjects which have often been considered to be taboo. The protagonists in Merciless Gods are misfits and junkies exploring their sexual identity. Almost all of the stories are set in Australia, where Tsiolkas himself grew up, and Read More
This is Lynn Michell’s second novel, following on from White Lies, which was published in 2011. Michell has also published non-fiction and children’s educational books. Alice Green is finding that hitting 50 is much the same as becoming invisible. In an attempt to turn this observation to her advantage, she goes on a shop-lifting spree. Read More
Alastair Bruce’s Boy on the Wire follows the efforts of John Hyde to revive his past; specifically the moment of his brother Paul’s death. With the use of a prologue, Bruce throws his readers straight into the deep end: “He is a man who lied, who told a story, a wild, fanciful story, about the death of a child, Read More
A debut novel which illustrates the tribulations and triumphs of raising an autistic child, Truestory by Catherine Simpson is simultaneously captivating, poignant and vivid. Living on a remote farm, Alice is forced to deal with Sam, her autistic son, Duncan, an emotionally estranged husband whose ventures plunge the family into chaos, and Larry, a travelling Read More
Andrew Nicoll is well-known for his novels If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead and The Good Mayor, the latter of which won the Saltire Prize for the First Book of the Year in 2009. His latest book is a murder mystery titled The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne. The cover, Read More
A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close is a brilliant work of fiction that has a multitude of layers and is set in various different timeframes from the early 1900s onwards. Based on true facts she has gathered, Close has written about an unconventional love triangle featuring two very unconventional women. These women, whom the Read More
To capture the effects of war on a person, humour the reader and shed doubt upon our country’s health system are all brave undertakings. Nonetheless, Victoria Hendry has taken the plunge and succeeded in achieving these aspects in her novel The Last Tour of Archie Forbes. Against the backdrop of the city of Edinburgh, described Read More
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance seems poetic, personal and political on the one page and then dismissive and cynical on the very next. The novel is the perfect microcosm of the nihilistic modern world, and when that dystopia is set in the historically romantic city of Paris, it turns into a symbol of tragedy. Read More