J.L. Carr's 'A Month in the Country'
J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) is a perfectly-achieved novel. In its 85 pages it contains multitudes.
Read MoreA Manual For Cleaning Women
Lucia Berlin’s title story for her collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is funny, painful, sharp, observant: just marvellous.
Read MoreIn The End, It Was All About Love
Musa Okwonga’s In The End, It Was All About Love is a small book with many pleasures.
Read MoreCat in the Rain
An exercise for English class suggested by George Saunders in his marvellous book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: divide Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’ into 6 equal parts, handing them out one at a time, and examining the ‘escalations’ of the story.
Read MoreSimple Passion
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux was first published in France in 1991, but now arrives in English from Fitzcarraldo Editions in an immaculate translation by Tanya Leslie, perhaps to coincide with a film version.
It can be read it in 30 minutes (note: opens with 'strong material'). It's intense and honest, as always with Ernaux. So this post is extremely short, too.
Here are my thoughts on the longer, brilliant, more complex The Years.
Open Water
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel, Open Water, is a lyrical story set in contemporary London, charting the tentative journey towards love of two young people. It is a novel about intimacy, dancing, music, and racism.
Read MoreClaire Keegan on 'Foster'
Claire Keegan’s novella Foster is one of the outstanding pieces of writing by an Irish author in recent years (and a fine option for class study). Some years ago she came to my school, read from the work, and was asked questions by the pupils.
Read MoreWhy the Moon Travels
Oein DeBhairduin’s collection Why the Moon Travels is a trove of fresh stories and reflections from a tradition hardly present in Irish literature so far.
Read MoreThe Fortnight in September
The constant undertow of R.C. Sherriff’s 1931 novel The Fortnight in September is time. The two significant words in the title are about time, and it colours everything that follows, but this is not a melancholic story.
Read MoreThe Nickel Boys
The Nickel Boys is an excavation of a part of American history that I had not known about. Reform ‘schools’ took in children of any colour, but given the overt racism of the Jim Crow era, the brutality of such places was particularly horrendous for black children.
Read MoreMr Loverman
Bernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel Mr Loverman is hugely enjoyable, just like her Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other.
Read MoreGirl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other is wonderful: such a tonic for ‘our time.’ While I found the previous Booker winner, Milkman by Anna Burns, an extraordinary achievement in sustaining a voice (dense, intense, disturbing), Evaristo’s book is just so hugely enjoyable.
Read MoreAli Smith: Spring
Spring is the third in Ali Smith’s seasons quartet. It will be interesting to see what these books, written out of the heat of immediate events in British culture, will look like in 20 years' time. Without that perspective, all we can say for the moment is that they are unique responses to the world today: complex, agile, rangy, funny, surprising and intellectually dazzling.
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