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 [...]
Tag: literature
How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
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 [...]
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee – Dalloway Day 5
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage: 1997, 9780099732518) Today my Dalloway Week Woolf fest comes to and end, and I’m giving Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf the honour (ha! LOL. Snickering of all manner) of being the first non-fiction title posted to Absurd Reviews. Reading a Virginia Woolf biography, as with any writer or artist [...]
Mrs Dalloway Day 4 – The Hours by Michael Cunningham
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 [...]
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Day 3 – A Passage
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) Happy Dalloway Day, again, on this Wednesday in the middle of June. In England, a bit warm, as fresh as Clarissa’s morning in the book. Today I bring you a passage I hope you will enjoy. This is Clarissa Dalloway recalling being eighteen and in love with her friend Sally. [...]
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Day 2 – Plot and Style
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) “If Woolf was better acquainted with profound sorrow than most, she was also, by some mysterious manifestation of will, better than almost anyone at conveying the pure joy of being alive. The quotidian pleasure of simply being present in the world.” – Michael Cunningham Mrs Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway as [...]
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Day 1 – Dalloway Day
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in London on a Wednesday in the middle of June in 1923, which would make the date June 13th. While Bloomsday (which celebrates James Joyce’s Ulysses) is widely celebrated every year, Dalloway Day is a far more modest affair. There are events to mark [...]
Booker Prize 2021 Round-up
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
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”. [...]
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
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 [...]