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 [...]
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 [...]
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics: 2006, 9780141441146) Check out more reviews here. "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with [...]
Absurd Reviews 