Tag: literary
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Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
In some respects, it’s difficult to review The Secret History – Donna Tartt’s 1992 masterpiece that ended up popularising the dark academia sub-genre – because it feels like everything that could have been been said has been said before. But given I took 15 years longer than I intended to get around to reading it, […]
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Book Review: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Told from several points of view, one of them being a fig tree, this story delves into a divided postcolonial Cyprus, mapping out the beginnings and ends of conflict, from acts of physical violence, to the internal emotional scars that remain decades and thousands of miles away. The Island of Missing Trees tells the story […]
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Book Review: The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
This is a story about death, grief, books, material possessions, mental health, mental illness, zen ideology, hoarding, clutter, consumerism, single parenthood… the list goes on and makes this story sound both expansive and perhaps rather dark. Expansive it certainly is. It stretches to 546 pages in hardback, has four points of view, and took me […]
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Review: Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter #20booksofsummer22
This little novella completely floored me. In 114 pages of half-prose and half-poetry, it speaks from the point of view of a bereaved family – boys who lost their mother and a father who lost his wife. There is a crow in the house with them, an irreverent and slightly absurd character. He’s a caretaker […]
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Review: Companion Piece by Ali Smith
The experience of reading this book was like that of reading a poem or looking at a painting…
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Review: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
This story was ridiculously funny, excruciatingly sad, just hopeful enough.
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Review: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman’s prose is brilliant at conveying complex concepts in an engaging and empathetic way.
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Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Tiny things are given space – like the reflection of the bulb of a ceiling light in the screen of a smartphone in the seconds that a character waits for a message response.
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
I did not find this an easy read but I did find it compelling and powerful.
em with pen 