To close out this year's June Pride Month I bring you a selection of some outstanding Own Voices literature that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a good book. What are your Own Voices LGBTQIA+ recs? The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst A Booker Prize winning contemporary masterpiece, the novel follows Nick Guest [...]
Booker Prize 2021 Shortlist Check out more reviews here. What is your ranking? Who is your winner? I am glad to have read most of the shortlist - rooting for #s 1 and 2! Click each title for the full reviews. #6 The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed I think Susanna Clarke won the Women’s [...]
Richard Powers, Bewilderment (Hutchinson Heinemann: 2021, 9781785152634) Check out more reviews here. Bewilderment is the story of Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist who lost his wife in an accident and is raising his son, Robin, alone. Robin is a neurodivergent 9-year-old boy, who has been diagnosed with “two Asperger’s, one probable OCD, and one possible ADHD”. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury: 2020, 9781526612144) Such a Fun Age opens with a Black babysitter called Emira being accosted by grocery store security upon being accused by a ‘Karen’ of kidnapping the white child she is babysitting. This prompts her boss, a liberal, wealthy, white social influencer called Alix, to get involved [...]
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer (Atlantic Books: 2018, 9781786495976) “WORDS Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again. BLEACH I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood. Most people use bleach indiscriminately, assuming it is a [...]
Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World (Penguin Books: 2020, 9780241979464) 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World begins with the end – of Tequila Leila’s life. Her death sparks a string of memories that take us from her birth to her death; from a childhood of oppression and abuse in [...]
Absurd Reviews 