Tag: novel
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‘speech language voice’: ‘Diego Garcia’ by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams
In this form-breaking novel, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams wowed judges of the Goldsmiths Prize by co-authoring a story of companionship and collectivity, even during pandemic lockdowns. But they also related the recent colonial history of the Chagossian people and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia: the forced evacuation of native peoples by the…
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Bastardising epic: Shehan Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022) won last year’s Booker Prize for its ‘energy, imagery and ideas [set] against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’. We find that ‘surreal vision’ in its depiction of the afterlife—both the In Between (a version of purgatory), and the…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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‘Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary literature and book prize shortlists’
‘Judge for Yourself’ is published on 5 October 2020.
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Slow reading: Adrian Duncan’s ‘Love Notes from a German Building Site’
Adrian Duncan‘s Love Notes from a German Building Site (Head of Zeus, 2019) tells Paul’s first-person story as he emigrates from Ireland to Germany to start afresh with his girlfriend, Evelyn. Paul is an engineer by trade, but his relationship with his job is tested and stretched by time spent on a job in Berlin—it…
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Two spatial poetics: Niamh Campbell’s ‘This Happy’
Niamh Campell’s This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) plots Alannah’s uncanny experience of her love life repeating itself from when she was a ‘young’ 23 to an ‘old(er)’ 30 years old. The two experiences—first with a married man, Harry, second with her unnamed husband—are not identical, but there are enough similarities for the storylines to…