4 Books Like Evenings and Weekends

This is a classic collection about the lost souls of American society who have not only failed to realise the American Dream but have been wrecked by it. Outcasts, drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, the desolate and the damned. These are stories told from the inside rather than with an anthropological observation; their narrators share the experience of those who live by different rules or no rules at all, their narrative frameworks are skewed towards the psychotic and surreal. But the language is what makes this collection exceptional. With the brilliance and sharpness of a diamond, Johnson’s prose tears his characters and narratives apart and puts them together again into something like poetry.

I loved the expanse of time this book covered. I love that there was a female protagonist who was a thoughtful, badass gamer. I am always up for books about deep and lasting friendships.

This book is full of murky, frustrating romantic relationships, but the central love story is an abiding friendship. Rachel and James are just beginning their adult lives, working together at a university bookstore, when they fall in love.

If it weren’t for James’s emphatic homosexuality and Rachel’s obsessive crush on her married, Liam Neeson-esque English professor, they might have ridden off into the sunset together. Instead, they become best friends, roommates, and partners in crime on the Cork, Ireland, club circuit. Things get complicated when James starts sleeping with said English professor.

I laughed so much reading this book that I mailed it to my own lifelong best friend the day I finished it.

A disturbing and beautiful novel with an oblique, unexpected approach to the horrors of war. If the ‘horrors of war’ is an off-putting phrase for you take heart, this is not about the violent frontline of World War I but its consequences and effects on those directly and indirectly involved. The heroine is a young girl called Lucy, a wonderfully touching character, who is taken into the dark woods, where fairy tale and true-life horror overlap. This is a profound book, but it is also often funny and moving, ultimately illustrating the human capacity for kindness and love.