How people can bear the unbearable! And how interconnected people's disparate unbearable situations can be.
As in, growing up a mixed-ethnicity orphan in the care of your cold-as-a-fish grandfather, in an impoverished country sliding into dysfunction (and where young men are seduced into terrorism)...and, as in being one speck in the global cloud of migration, landing in New York, working crap kitchen jobs and bike delivery, sharing a crap apartment with too many other guys...
The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran Desai's extraordinary Man Booker Prize winning novel.
High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time.
The judge, broken by a world too messy for justice, is haunted by his past. His orphan granddaughter has fallen in love with her handsome tutor, despite their different backgrounds and ideals. The cook's heart is with his son, who is working in a New York restaurant, mingling with an underclass from all over the globe as he seeks somewhere to call home.
Something in the culture Ireland produces so many brilliant story tellers, writers especially strong in family. Often those books have a grim edge. Life in Ireland can be hard, I get it. But in this, and his other books, Williams' gives the story a lightness, and treats human frailties and even perceptions of magic with empathy.
A classic love story and a seminal work of Irish literature that is a testament to romance, magic and the power of true love. With an introduction by actor John Hurt.
In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need. . .
Nicholas Coughlan and Isabel Gore are meant for each other - they just don't know it yet. Though each has found both heartache and joy in the wild…
Dunthorne isn't the only writer of German Jewish descent who has explored a bewildering and tragic family history, circa World War II. (His Jewish great grandfather was a scientist who—bizarrely—helped the Nazis develop things like the poison gas used in holocaust mass murders—thus his family came through relatively unscathed.) The bleakness and unfathomability are leavened by Dunthornes' hesitations and bumbling as a researcher, which he happily shares. Odd to find myself smiling so often at a story like this...and a welcome change.
Off-beat, irreverent and subversive - a Jewish family memoir about convenient delusions and unsayable truths, from the acclaimed author of the cult classic novel, Submarine
'The best book I've read in the past year . . . A masterpiece' Financial Times
'A slippery marvel [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness' Observer
'Poignant and profound, comic and unconventional - and genuinely, searingly meaningful' The New York Times
Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under…
I was sixteen in 1964, growing up fast, if not as fast as I wished. I had friends. I had fun. I smoked Lucky Strikes. I had a car, and drove with abandon.
With my white suburban friends I went into the Black city to see the Motown Revue and hear jazz in smokey clubs. I joined civil rights demonstrations, embarking on an activist path that in a few years placed me in the militant Weather Underground. I had sex with girls, to hide the excruciating, then-unmentionable fact that I am gay. My father was checked out while my mother was dying—and that was another taboo subject. So I pretended I didn't care. I imagined myself to be a worldly proto-adult. But I was a scared kid.
