I am the product of a love triangle—an unusual one, between a French Holocaust survivor, an African student from France’s colonies, and a black GI. My parents came of age during really turbulent times and led big, bold lives. They rarely spoke about their pasts, but once I began digging—in the letters they exchanged, in conversations with my grandmother and aunts, with their childhood friends—I realized that all three had witnessed up close so much of the drama and horrors of the twentieth century and that what they had lived together merited being told. My parents’ love triangle is at the heart of my love of love-triangle stories.
Likemy first recommendation, this is a classic love triangle story, classically told. I’m rooting for Fermina and Florentino to realize the dream love that they imagined in their youths and that they wrote out in all those letters. And then life intercedes…
As in so much of Garcia Marquez’s work, there aren’t clear heroes and villains, just characters I care deeply about and watch—biting my nails all the while—as they make decisions that end up complicating and eventually compromising their own hopes and aspirations.
There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Carribean River Boat Company; the woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey up-river, at an age when they can expect 'nothing more in life', holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of…
This book is a message in a bottle for dark times. Bulgakov wrote this novel from Stalin's Soviet Union and managed to find a way to laugh (if darkly). His daring and vibrant imagination took me to another world and even made me laugh out loud.
'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent
Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will…
It brought me so close to the characters and also led me deep into a world, time and place I knew little about but now feel much closer to. Great book!
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida-war photographer, gambler, and closet queen-has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to…
Each story is a banger. The overarching narrative is more like a vehicle for the stories, but I do appreciate the effort a reader has to put in to reconcile the ending.
'A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam.' ALI SMITH
'A writer we should be delirious to have as a contemporary.' INDEPENDENT
The new novel from the Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted author Helen Oyeyemi.
Oyeyemi treats you to a kaleidoscopic weekend in Prague, as dazzling as it is effortlessly unique. Get lost in the story like you would an unfamiliar city and let it reward you with moments of philosophical clarity, wheelbarrow rides, raw emotion and raw onions.
This novel is a holiday, an adventure, a marvel and a guide. It is a story about the lies…
I think this is the only novel I've ever read that features a pygmy hippo. I'm a fan of Ogawa's fiction, especially The Memory Police. This novel, told with a striking and buoyant honesty from the point of view of a twelve-year-old who spends a year in the home of wealthy relatives, is a delightful portrait of an eccentric, yet loving family that learns to live in harmony with its secrets.
On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars.
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.
The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing…
Despite detailing an immigrant childhood living with poverty, racism and the serious daily fears that even the simplest of infractions (committed by her) could get her entire family arrested and deported back to China, the author still manages to make her narrative a joyful one. Her discovery of the library and that she could get books for free was so relatable (as well as her love of special places in her house to get quiet time to read her favorite book series like The Babysitter’s Club). Her parents and her relationship with them, friends and issues at school are also universally relatable although I do not share the immigrant experience. There is so much humor and honesty in the author’s writing that there were some sentences I had to read more than once because they made me laugh so hard and others because I realized I had tears running down…
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK, OBAMA 2021 BOOK PICK and INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness.'
In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is 'illegal.'
Qian is just seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents find that the roads of New York City are not paved with gold, but crushing fear and scarcity. Unable to speak English at first, Qian and her parents must work wherever they can to survive, all while…
Extremely well written memoir about the author’s family and the incredible story of his adopted siblings and their Christian fundamentalist/separatist birth parents.
From one of Australia's most brilliant writers, a dark comedy about the tangled fates of two couples and the children trapped between them Michael and Mary Shelley are Christian fanatics who loathe their fellow Australians – especially their 'foul language, reckless indulgence of alcohol and obsession with idiotic ball sports'.
Lenore and Tom Blaine are working-class Queensland publicans raising a large family in a raucous, loving, rugby-league-obsessed home.
There's just one problem. The Blaines are foster parents to three of the Shelleys' children, who were removed from Michael and Mary as infants. And the Shelleys are prepared to do anything…
Ma is truly original in her conception of storytelling, mixing the absurd with the quotidian. She really knows how to write an ending, one that prompts the reader to think about what might come after the ending. A collection of stories has lots more endings than a novel!
A National Indie Bestseller Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize A Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
“Uncanny and haunting . . . Genius.” ―Michele Filgate, The Washington Post “Dazzling.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?
The book it took me the longest to read, because there is no plot or characters or a "connective tissue" in The Book of Disquiet. What it has is amazing prose writing in every single of its almost 600 pages, filled with ideas and instrospection, wisdom and melancholy, futility and meaning. Every fragment of this diary of musings, this factless autobiography, is solid gold. It's a book to have as a buddy alongside you and to return to as time passes.
A modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith in Penguin Modern Classics.
'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and…
