Why get hung up on whether this superb book is memoir or fiction? It's a hell-for-leather read. But more importantly, it's stunning is its truth, including whatever parts were embroidered or invented. I'm in awe of Akhtar's honest depiction of the experience of otherness, and that he avoided any whiff of victimhood. (Also, it has possibly the most intense and candid description of sex with a woman, from the point of view of a man, that I've ever read. Speaking of stunning truthfulness.)
This "beautiful novel . . . has echoes of The Great Gatsby": an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Dwight Garner, New York Times).
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 A Best Book of 2020 * Entertainment Weekly * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly * NPR * The Economist * Shelf Awareness * Library Journal * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Slate Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for…
It's a panoramic tour of the last four decades of Scotland's history, in the company of folk-rockers and radical activists, strivers and failures. It's a gritty immersive reality (but not grim in the manner of Stuart Douglas or James Kelman). Exuberant, careening, loud, stoned, sad, depressed—and thoroughly engaging. A really impressive achievement is the great number of characters—even minor ones are indelibly drawn—and the jigsaw-puzzle way they fit together to complete the story, even as the telling moves back and forth in time and location.
'Gripping and moving. A literary triumph' Nicola Sturgeon
'A humane and searching story' Ian Rankin
'Kirstin Innes is aiming high, writing for readers in the early days of a better nation' A.L. Kennedy
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR * A SCOTSMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
Three days before her fifty-first birthday Clio Campbell - one-hit wonder, political activist, lifelong love and one-night-stand - kills herself in her friend Ruth's spare bedroom. And, as practical as she is, Ruth doesn't know what to do.
As the news spreads around Clio's collaborators and comrades, lovers and enemies, the story of…
Set against and interlaced with the doomed 1916 Irish rebellion against British domination, we have a doomed love affair of two young boys. That was before gay was the word, and a time and place, where gay was definitely not good. This was the second time I read it. I can't think of another book that left me in tears on the last page. I cried the second timet, too.
Praised as “a work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement” by Entertainment Weekly, Jamie O’Neill’s first novel invites comparison to such literary greats as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens.
Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son—revolutionary and blasphemous—of Mr. Mack’s old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the…
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible. Plus, his mother is dying. And in an era when it can't be discussed, he is fighting being gay.
His family's fracturing and his struggle for authenticity are explored with bravery—and humor, and self-forgiveness. He excruciatingly portrays the agony queer boys undergo to live up to flimsy concepts of acceptable masculinity. Along the way he investigates the peculiar phenomenon of memory, seemingly concrete and yet surprisingly malleable to the forces of time and distance.
