Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (Dialogue Books: 2020, 9780349701479) The Vignes twins are descendants of the founder of Mallard, a small, unmapped town in Louisiana. Alphonse Decuir, a formerly enslaved, biracial man now in possession of his father’s land, wanted to build a place for people “who would never be accepted as white”. His vision [...]
Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Tinder Press: 2021, 9781472268778) How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is set in the mid-1980s in the fictional Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, where luxury holiday villas skirt the paradisiacal beach and intrude on the local community that is afflicted by poverty and violence. [...]
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Penguin: 2020, 9780241988664) In Ya Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom our narrator, Gifty, is nearing the completion of her neuroscience PhD at Stanford University where she researches “the neural circuits of reward-seeking behaviour.” Her routine is interrupted when her mother, who suffers from severe depression, comes to stay, bringing the past to the [...]
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House (Bloomsbury Publishing: 2019, 9781526624062) From the outside, the Conroy family looked like the picture of the American dream. Cyril Conroy, having taken advantage of the post-war economic boom, invests in real-estate and quickly takes his family from living in a precarious military base, to a life of luxury in an [...]
Ali Smith, Summer (Hamish Hamilton: 2020, 9780241207062) And so Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet comes to an end. Smith’s project begun in 2016, with Autumn, and since then she has published one book a year, tackling the mess we have all been going through or witnessing over the past few years: Brexit, xenophobia, misogyny, climate change, [...]
Ashley Audrain, The Push (Michael Joseph: 2021, 9780241434550) Blythe comes from a line of neglectful, abusive mothers. She seems to more or less have made peace with her background but it comes back to haunt her when her picture-perfect-obsessed husband decides they need a baby. She knows he expects her to be the perfect wife [...]
Eley Williams, The Liar’s Dictionary (William Heinemann: 2020, 9781785152047) Words can be like bricks or stone. They can be used to build Westminster Abbey and Notre-Dame, or they can be used to sculpt la Sagrada Família. Even though my interest in any church will only ever be of the architectural variety, when I emerged from [...]
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name (Atlantic Books: 2007, 9781786495259) " 'Later!' The word, the voice, the attitude. I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again. It is [...]
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-62 (Faber & Faber: 1963, 9780571055494) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table;Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,The muttering retreatsOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotelsAnd sawdust restaurants [...]
Anne Tyler, Redhead on the Side of the Road (Chatto & Windus: 2020, 9781784743475) Meet Micah Mortimer, a Baltimore middle-aged man, caretaker of his building, and founder and single employee of Tech Hermit, a tech help business. He follows a rigid routine which includes running (in cutoffs or jeans) every morning and performing meticulously scheduled [...]
Absurd Reviews 