Translated from French by Alison AndersonPublished by MacLehose Press, 2017, 448 pages. Original version published in 2015. Marcus Goldman is a successful writer who has moved to Florida to write his next book. But he is haunted by his past: his point of reference is a “tragedy”, and he measures time from the event. Ever …
Category: Fiction
The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson
Published by Penguin, 1939, 208 pages. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for …
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Girl in White Cotton/Burnt Sugar: Avni Doshi
Published by Fourth Estate India / Penguin, 2019, 240 pages. Note: This book was published as Girl in White Cotton in India and under the title of Burnt Sugar elsewhere. Caregiving in the best of circumstances is a fraught business. One that is made more so when it involves a relationship that is itself threadbare, …
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Actress: Anne Enright
Published by Jonathan Cape, 2020, 272 pages. How do you cope with being the daughter of a famous actress? What does it mean to live with someone for whom performing is not just something she does on stage? Norah’s mother is Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish stage and screen actress. Katherine was a single mother, …
Beyond the Seasons—Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Review by Usha RamanPublished by Penguin / Anchor Books My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through …
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The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLeanPublished by MacLehose Press / Riverhead Books, 2018, 508 pages. Original version published in 2015. "There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places… they are places that are not within the …
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All the Beautiful Liars: Sylvia Petter
Published by Lightning Books, 2021, 320 pages. “Memories? They’re the bits you feel and the bits you’re told, and they all come together in your mind as sound bytes and snapshots. Some you lose, and some become part of someone else’s memories. Some bits just disappear, and you end up looking for them for the …
Piranesi: Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 272 pages. “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens once every eight years.” This is how the book begins. The narrator lives in a vast labyrinth of halls filled …
Disobedience: Naomi Alderman
Published by Penguin / Touchstone, 2006, 288 pages. In London, a beloved Rabbi addresses his congregation in spite of his failing health. The Rav’s voice has lost some of its resonance but the people do not want to believe that he is dying, “he from whom the light of Torah seemed to shine so brightly …
The Moor’s Account: Laila Lalami
Published by Random House / Pantheon / Periscope / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014, 336 pages. History is written by the victors, as the saying goes. What we know of the conquest—or the invasion—of the Americas tends to come from those who conquered the land. This book gives another perspective—the narrator, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, …
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