‘Autumn’ is the first of four books in a planned series of novels by Ali Smith named after the seasons and which focus on how we experience time. Set during the fallout of the Brexit referendum result in 2016, it follows the friendship between Elisabeth Demand, a thirty-two-year-old history of art lecturer and her eccentric 101-year-old former next-door neighbour Daniel Gluck who is spending his dying days in an assisted care facility. Continue reading
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Autumn by Ali Smith
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Swing Time by Zadie Smith
‘Swing Time’ by Zadie Smith tells the story of two mixed-race girls, an unnamed narrator and her friendship with Tracey who grow up together on neighbouring council estates in north-west London in the 1980s. From Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson, music and dance dominate their lives but it is only Tracey who has the real talent to pursue a career as a dancer. The narrator goes to university and works as a personal assistant for mononymous international pop star Aimee who decides to set up a school for girls in west Africa. The story alternates between the past and present and even though the girls spend a considerable time apart in later years, Tracey’s influence can always be felt. Continue reading
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The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue tells the story of Lib Wright, a widowed English nurse who trained under Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war. She is sent to a rural village in Ireland to independently observe Anna O’Donnell, an eleven-year-old girl whose parents claim has not eaten any solid food for four months, subsisting purely on “manna from heaven” and a few teaspoons of water a day. While the community accepts this claim without questioning it and visitors travel from afar to witness the miracle, Lib is immediately sceptical and expects the medical surveillance to be over in a couple of days once the fraud has been exposed. She alternates her shifts with a local nun Sister Michael and considers every possible way food could have been secretly smuggled to Anna. However, as more time passes, Lib starts to doubt her own beliefs and realises that there is more to Anna’s case than meets the eye.
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The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade
‘The Winterlings’ by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade was one of my Women in Translation Month reads in August and my rather belated review is finally here. Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter, it tells the story of two sisters, Saladina and Dolores, from the small rural village of Tierra de Chá in Galicia in north-west Spain. After living in England for several years during and after the Spanish Civil War, the Winterlings, as they are known, eventually return to their grandfather’s cottage as adults in the 1950s. However, the sisters have secrets about why they have decided to come back while the villagers are equally evasive about what happened to their grandfather during the war. Continue reading
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Far and Away by Andrew Solomon
‘Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years’ is Andrew Solomon’s collection of travel writing in countries undergoing huge political, social and cultural change. I really enjoyed his masterfully perceptive book Far From the Tree which explores the multiple facets of identity and difference. His intimate reporting on vast subjects is very compelling and it is hard to think of a more open-minded and generous travelling companion than Solomon.
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Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec
I first came across Georges Perec’s work at university through his first novel ‘Things: A Story of the Sixties’ which was by far the most interesting book I had to read for one of my French literature modules focusing on consumerism. I’ve had ‘Life: A User’s Manual’ on my TBR list ever since which is probably Perec’s best known novel published in 1978 and translated from the French by David Bellos in 1987. Continue reading
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
It would have been interesting to read ‘We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ without knowing the twist which is revealed on page 77. However, as Karen Joy Fowler’s sixth novel has been one of the more commercially successful and widely discussed Man Booker Prize shortlisted books in recent years, I assume that the majority of potential readers will already know the basic premise of the story. Although I don’t think knowing about the big revelation beforehand lessened my enjoyment of the novel, if you still don’t want to read any further spoilers, then look away now. Continue reading
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Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ by Madeleine Thien is a multi-generational saga of two families set against the backdrop of key events in 20th century Chinese history, from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. In Vancouver in the early 1990s, Chinese refugee Ai-ming comes to stay with Marie whose father Jiang Kai committed suicide in 1989 when she was ten years old. Kai, a talented concert pianist, knew Ai-ming’s father Sparrow, an equally gifted composer, when they studied music in the 1960s at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music with Sparrow’s cousin Zhuli, a violin prodigy. Through fragments from a series of notebooks and diaries, Marie searches for answers about her father and his life in China during a turbulent period of the country’s history. Continue reading
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On Anonymity, Identity and Elena Ferrante
There are many reasons why authors may choose to publish their work anonymously or pseudonymously. Historically, this has primarily been due to the threat of persecution or prosecution if the material produced was controversial and/or illegal. More recently, however, it has often stemmed from the author’s desire to simply let the words speak for themselves. Continue reading
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Vinegar Girl and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
‘Vinegar Girl’ by Anne Tyler is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series – a project which involves today’s bestselling novelists retelling William Shakespeare’s best known plays. In this modern interpretation of the comedy ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Kate Battista is a single twenty-nine-year-old nursery teacher living with her absent-minded academic father Louis and her fifteen-year-old sister Bunny. Her father hatches a plan to marry Kate off to his socially awkward eastern European lab assistant Pyotr so he can stay in the United States after his Visa expires. Continue reading
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My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
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My Name is Leon’ by Kit de Waal is a story about two young children, mixed race eight-year-old Leon and his white half-brother Jake, who are taken into care in the early 1980s after their mother Carol develops serious mental health issues. While Jake is quickly adopted by another family, Leon stays behind with experienced foster carer Maureen and struggles to cope with being separated from his baby brother. When Maureen becomes unwell, he is taken in by her sister Sylvia and starts spending time with Tufty at the allotment but remains determined to find a way to be reunited with Jake and Carol. Continue reading
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The Appearance of Murder by John Nightingale
I was intrigued by Professor John Sutherland’s recommendation of ‘The Appearance of Murder’ by John Nightingale in his books of the year round-up in The Times last Christmas in which he described it as “the most teasingly pleasurable crime mystery novel I’ve come across this year”. It tells the story of crime fiction author David Knight who is trying to finish his latest novel but gets caught up in a mystery from his own past. A young woman named Perdita unexpectedly turns up at his house with an old photograph of five Cambridge undergraduates including David himself and a musician named Mark Ryland who died in mysterious circumstances. She believes that one of the five men in the picture is her father but doesn’t know which one. However, following an accident during a hockey game twenty-five years ago, David’s memory of that particular period of his life is decidedly sketchy, which somewhat restricts his ability to unravel the mystery of what happened to his university contemporaries all those years ago. Continue reading
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Chiswick Book Festival 2016
I have been to a number of individual literary events in London over the last few years but until this weekend, I had never been to one of the many book festivals held in the capital each year. Now in its eighth year, Chiswick Book Festival in west London runs from Thursday 15th – Monday 19th September with talks from a wide variety of authors and other speakers. Armed with an all-day pass, I went to four events at St Michael and All Angels Church and the Tabard Theatre yesterday.
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The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
‘The Tidal Zone’ by Sarah Moss tells the story of Adam Goldschmidt, a stay-at-home dad and part-time academic, married to overworked GP Emma. Their eldest daughter fifteen-year-old Miriam suddenly collapses on a school playing field and nearly dies after going into anaphylactic cardiac arrest. In the aftermath of the incident, the family must find a way to move on and return to some form of normality whilst coming to terms with the possibility that Miriam’s condition could be genetic and may happen again at any time. Continue reading
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Serious Sweet by A. L. Kennedy
Longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, ‘Serious Sweet’ by A. L. Kennedy is set over the course of twenty-four hours in London in 2014, following a day in the lives of 45-year-old recovering alcoholic Meg Williams and 59-year-old divorced senior civil servant Jon Sigurdsson. At first, the characters appear to lead seemingly separate lives but it is gradually revealed that their paths have already crossed before. The day revolves around the pair attempting to meet and whether they are able to move on from the traumatic events which have shaped their lives. Continue reading
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How Blogging Has Changed My Reading Habits
1. I read more books than I used to. This must be something that pretty much every book blogger can identify with. Even though blogging itself takes up a lot of time, it’s pretty hard not to start reading more when following other blogs leads to so many new sources of book recommendations. However, I also know my limits and reading during my commute to work and sticking consistently to one or two blog posts a week feels achievable and has helped me avoid both reading and blogging burnout.
2. I read more new books than I used to. This is partly a consequence of receiving review copies from publishers but following other bloggers with similar reading tastes and literary award longlists means I often seek out copies of newly published books from other sources too.
3. My reading tastes have diversified a lot in terms of genre. As well as newer books, I have been reading more non-fiction and translated fiction and I don’t think I would have made so many new discoveries if I didn’t run a blog.
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This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell
‘This Must Be The Place’ by Maggie O’Farrell tells the story of Daniel Sullivan, an American linguistics professor living in a remote farmhouse in Donegal with his reclusive ex-film star wife Claudette, their two children and Claudette’s son from a previous relationship. When Daniel learns that an ex-girlfriend died shortly after they split up in the 1980s, he sets out to discover what happened to her all those years ago, even if it risks destroying his struggling marriage. Continue reading
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The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami
My next Women in Translation Month read is ‘The Nakano Thrift Shop’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell. I really enjoyed reading Strange Weather in Tokyo a couple of years ago (also known as ‘The Briefcase’ in the United States) and I was pleased to see another novel by Kawakami published by Portobello Books earlier this month with another excellent cover design by Natsumi Hayashi. Originally released in Japan in 2005, ‘The Nakano Thrift Shop’ tells the story of Hitomi Suganuma who starts working as a cashier selling second-hand goods in a thrift shop owned by the mysterious Haruo Nakano. He has several ex-wives and is having an affair with Sakiko while his older sister Masaya is an artist who regularly pops in and offers guidance. Meanwhile, Hitomi is largely preoccupied with another employee, the introverted Takeo, who helps Mr Nakano with house clearances. Continue reading
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Four Non-Fiction Books I’ve Read Recently
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize earlier this year and winner of the Wainwright Prize, The Outrun by Amy Liptrot is a memoir about her descent into alcoholism and subsequent recovery after returning to her childhood home of Orkney at the age of thirty. There is a stark contrast between Liptrot’s hipster lifestyle in east London in her twenties where her addiction to alcohol led to relationship breakdowns, job losses and a driving conviction and the contemplative days spent observing corncrakes and living on the remote island of Papa Westray with a population of just seventy. Above all, it is a book which explores the meaning of connections, whether it is through people, places, drugs, wildlife or technology. Much like the excellent H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, it successfully brings together a moving narrative of trauma with nature appreciation and could be a contender for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize) ahead of the longlist announcement next month. Continue reading
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In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
I have been reading ‘In Other Words’ by Jhumpa Lahiri for Women in Translation Month hosted by Biblibio for the third year running. I enjoyed Lahiri’s short stories and novels which mostly focus on themes based around the experience of Bengali immigrants living on the east coast of the United States so I was intrigued that she had recently written a non-fiction book in Italian about her experiences of learning the language with Ann Goldstein’s translation into English on the opposite page.
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