Published by Corsair, 2018, 384 pages. “Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea… . Then within the marsh…true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp …
Category: Fiction
Babylon: Yasmina Reza
Translated from French by Linda AsherPublished by Seven Stories Press, 2018, 208 pages. Original version published in 2016. “The world isn’t tidy. It’s a mess. I don’t try to make it neat.” This epigraph from Garry Winograd, an American street photographer, opens the book. The story is narrated by Elisabeth, a sixty-year-old woman looking back …
The Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
Published by Vintage, 2002, 672 pages. When Oliver Garland, a well-respected judge, dies—ostensibly of a heart attack—his daughter, Mariah, suspects foul play. Her brother, Tal, a professor of law at a university, is sceptical. Oliver (whom Tal refers to as The Judge) was tipped to a Supreme Court judge, one of the two black judges. …
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Beauty is a Wound: Eka Kurniawan
Translated from Indonesian by Annie TuckerPublished by Pushkin Press, 2016, 480 pages. Original version published in 2002. “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. … She had passed away at fifty-two, rose again after being dead for twenty-one years, and from that point …
A Man Called Ove: Fredrick Backman
Translated from Swedish by Henning KochPublished by Washington Square Press, 2014, 320 pages. Original version published in 2012. “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his finger a policeman’s flashlight.” When we meet him, …
A Haunted House and Other Stories: Virginia Woolf
Published by Vintage, 1944, 336 pages. I haven’t read Virginia Woolf for decades, and I had forgotten just how well she writes. I had bought this collection of her short stories in the 1980s, and it was one of the many books I had left behind in my parents’ house when I moved. It has …
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Go, Went, Gone: Jenny Erpenbeck
Translated from German by Susan BernofskyPublished by Portobello Books, 2017, 304 pages. Original version published in 2015. “War destroys everything…your family, your friends, the place where you lived, your work, your life. When you become foreign…you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, …
Magpie Murders: Anthony Horowitz
Published by Orion, 2016, 464 pages. This is a whodunit within a whodunit. One Friday evening, Susan Ryeland, the Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books, picks up Magpie Murders, the latest manuscript by Alan Conway—one of their most successful writers—and takes it home. She pours herself a glass of wine and starts to read. As …
The Gap of Time: Jeanette Winterson
Published by Hogarth Press, 2015, 320 pages. “God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness.” A man driven crazy by jealousy, a wife accused of adultery and a lost child: this is Jeanette Winterson’s take on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.[1] But unlike Othello, The Winter’s Tale …
Flicker: Theodore Roszak
Published by Summit Books / Chicago Review Press, 1991, 608 pages. “[E]ntertainment rules more lives than art and rules them more despotically. People don’t put up their guard when they’re being entertained. The images and the messages slip through and take hold deeper.” Flicker is a thriller, a history of film (with a conspiracy …
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