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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
Absurd Reviews 