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 [...]
In How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie, we are led by Grace Bernard through an epic revenge mission against her fashion tycoon father who left her and her mother to live in comparative depravation while he cosied up with his ‘real family’ in extravagance and luxury. This part of the story is as [...]
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Fourth Estate: 2003, 9781841150352) I hope you had a good Dalloway Day yesterday and on Monday. I did promise a Dalloway week so I thought I’d expand the Dalloway horizon today. Meet, or revisit, The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The book is a/n(?) homage, or reworking, of Mrs Dalloway. In the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Absurd Reviews 