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
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
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
A reviewer’s duty, before forming responses of any kind, is to read, and to read carefully. That responsibility begins from the moment the text is selected, whatever the seductions of the title, cover or writer. Anuradha Roy’s third novel is indeed seductively packaged. Sleeping on Jupiter revels in a very beautiful jacket and it is Read More
This novel takes one of the many, infinite silences of history and gives it a voice. The voice is that of our narrator, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, and the story is ‘a true account of his life and travels from the city of Azemmur to the Land of the Indians, where he arrived Read More
‘The seasons seem for a long time to ask nothing of you, but eventually you must brave their familiarity.’ Set between Saltcoats, Blackpool and Afghanistan, Andrew O’Hagan’s fifth novel, The Illuminations, tells the story of Anne Quirk and her nephew Luke as they delve into Anne’s past and confront the disintegration of identity, both personal Read More