Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men (Viking: 2021, 9780241466940) The Fortune Men is the novelisation of a murder and of the wrongful conviction of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor, in Cardiff in the 1950s. The book is written from the perspective of Mahmood and occasionally of the murder victim’s sister Diana. The racism and incompetence of [...]
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Granta Publications: 2021, 9781783786947) Our protagonist Krishan receives news of the death of his grandmother’s carer, Rani, and decides to attend her funeral in the north of Sir Lanka, a region that still bears the scars of the 1983-2009 civil war. As Krishan prepares for the trip north and [...]
Damon Galgut, The Promise (Chatto & Windus: 2021, 9781784744069) The Promise follows a white South African family through decades of loss and disappointment. Three children and a father are left behind when the matriarch of the family dies at the age of 40 at the start of the novel. Amor, the youngest daughter, overhears a [...]
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber & Faber: 2021, 9780571365425) Once or twice before I have been foolish enough to confess that I think something about a book is objectively weak. Here I concede: this is a competent novel but personally I just don’t connect with the characters very much. Rooney’s women have [...]
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (Penguin Classics: 2014, 9780141392035) Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 in Ukraine but fled Brazil post WW1 in 1922 and considered herself Brazilian. The Hour of the Star, published in 1977, follows Macabéa, a poor woman from the northeast living in Rio de Janeiro in (presumably) the 70s. [...]
The winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction will be announced tomorrow, so I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the nominees. This was the first time I read the entire shortlist of a literary award. For a mood-reader, it wasn’t always the most fun! But I hoped it would give me a [...]
Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Tinder Press: 2021, 9781472268778) Having read the shortlist, I have a firm winner: How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones. I have already showered it with well-deserved praise here, so I will just reiterate that the novel reads like an instant classic. The [...]
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (Bloomsbury Publishing: 2021, 9781526622440) Piranesi is a man who lives in a labyrinth-like house of apparently infinite rooms filled with statues. The lower floor has a sea and bodies of water, tides, waves, etc and the upper floors have birds and the / a sky. The house is Piranesi’s world. Initially the [...]
Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus: 2021, 9781526629760) So. This is awkward. Not my favourite book. Most people seem to either like the book or show deference to its (alleged) formal experimentation, so this rant review is but a drop in the ocean and meant light-heartedly. In No One is Talking [...]
Claire Fuller, Unsettled Ground (Fig Tree: 2021, 9780241457443) Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller tells the story of 51-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius. They live in isolation in rural England with their mother, earning just enough to live on by selling produce from their modest garden and the odd jobs Julius takes on. When their mother [...]
Absurd Reviews 