Read: And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Burgh ★★★★ 📚
Working class boy is dazzled by Cambridge & his magician, occultist “friend”. Page turner, dark academia.
Some people say we’re our true selves when we think nobody is watching. But how do we know our own identities without others’ confirming gaze? If, like the tree falling in the proverbial wood, nobody is around to hear us, is our story a story at all? And when were different things to different people, what then?
Read Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★ 📚
Love story that investigates class, race, sexism & history in Africa, USA & Britain
Obinze saw himself through Vincent’s eyes: a university staff child who grew up eating butter and now needed his help.
Read: TheWater Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates ★★★★ 📚
Slavery & the underground railway in the USA. Realistic, except for the hero’s developing ‘superpower’ which I guess was a metaphor. Not as horrific as other slavery novels I’ve read but spells out a lot powerfully.
Read: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver ★★★★ 📚
You can see some of the roots of Demon Copperhead in this tail of a poor Kentucky girl. Published in 1988 the refugee sub story is still pertinent.
Read: Ripeness by Sarah Moss ★★★★ 📚
Edith in her 70s in 2023 and 17 in the 70s in alternative chapters, the echos of the holocaust, family, belonging to a place, refugees & friendship. Excursions into Irishness & ballet.
Mike’s friend Phineas in Dublin is a sound engineer, hears whole orchestras of weather, traffic, birds that for her are only ambient noise. Sound and signal, she thinks, meaning in every atom and cell if you remember to look and listen. And Dennis the chef, eyes half-closed as he attends to his tongue, names each herb and the provenance of the oil in a salad, and the perfumery up the hill here, every note in a scent, they say, music the metaphor for smell, all of everything, everywhere.
Read: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
After The Land in Winter, this turned out to be quite different. Reminded me of Kidnapped! An atrocity in Spain, an English solider, running from another sent to kill him, heads for the Hebrides. Excitement & sympathy for all the characters.
Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.
There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them
Read: One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson ★★★★☆📚
I think the author was trying to see how many seeming unrelated treads she could tie up. Good fun, subtitled A Jolly Murder Mystery, set in Edinburgh during the festival.
Read: Bringing the House Down by Charlotte Runcie ★★★★ 📚
Great fun. Critic makes a right mess of mixing review & life in the most selfish way. The criticised act tears him apart. Online cancelling follows.
Read: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane ★★★★ 📚
A quite varied and strange set of short stories. My favourite involved a colossal squid and the ghost of Darwin. There was an eternal mechanical budgie in another!
Read: – The Sleepwalkers by Scarlet Thomas ★★★★ 📚
Quite a fevered read. Story told in fragments, notes, voice memos from different p.o.v. The narrators are all unreliable, even the voice memos, mixed up like an automatically generated transcript. Gothic & gruesome.
