Category: Reviews
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Wild Geese
This book went on my “most anticipated” list as soon as I heard its premise: Phoebe’s somewhat settled immigrant life in Copenhagen working on a PhD she no longer cares much about, is upended when her college ex Grace unexpectedly knocks on her door. Often billed as “the first Irish trans novel” (which I cannot…
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I Could Read the Sky
Constant is my attraction to books that offer a meandering reflection on life, landscape, and communities, particularly with a focus of Irish itinerancy, and therefore I Could Read the Sky has cemented itself as an instant, incomparable favourite. The narrator, in his twilight years, lies in bed in London and begins to see visions of…
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Brainwyrms
“So… is it as good as the first one?” is what everyone asks me when I gush about Brainwyrms. The straightforward reply is “definitely yes,” but I always feel compelled to qualify my answer: “well, yes, though it’s very different.” You see, while Tell Me I’m Worthless was Rumfitt’s take on the gothic haunted house…
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Daddy Boy
I love describing this book almost as much as I loved reading it: after the dissolution of a decade-long romantic relationship with a dominatrix, Emerson Whitney embarked on a failed storm chasing tour. Interspersed with the account of this wacky road adventure are Whitney’s meditations on gender, love, family, and the physical and relational impacts…
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Exiles
I’ve read every Jane Harper crime thriller and this is the best one so far. Aaron Falk, her investigator in previous books The Dry and Force of Nature, is visiting friends in a small Australian town. It’s a year since his last visit, and a year since local woman Kim went missing from a seasonal…
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A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar
A memoir about a trans man coming out as gay and how he navigates dating life in London may seem niche. After all, the author himself points out that he was compelled to write this book because he couldn’t find any of its kind on the shelves. And yet, not even halfway through I found…
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Space Crone
This excellent diverse anthology includes essays and short stories from the author of speculative fiction including The Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. I was delighted to find that it included my favourite short story of all time, Sur, in which a group of women set out to reach the south pole…
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Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare
This essential and well-written book is a mixture of useful history and current issues in UK healthcare. The author explores areas including eugenics, race science, development of health policies and treatments. Sowemimo brings her personal experience as NHS doctor to her analysis. Her first-hand accounts of training and practice in UK medicine map her historical…
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A Bookshop in Algiers
This brilliant short novel is a transporting read. Based on a true story, we see young Parisian Edmond Charlot open his tiny dream bookshop and publishing house Les Vraies Richesses in Algiers in 1936, and take it through the Second World War and beyond. A Bookshop in Algiers opens by inviting the reader on a…
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The Happy Couple
Looking for a summer read that will keep you hooked but does not involve gruesome murders or great tragedy? Look no further – The Happy Couple is the one. Effortlessly funny and full of memorable characters, it is just the right length (and size, even as a hardcover!) to be the perfect travel companion. Luke…
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Brian
I always find that I need to relate to the characters to enjoy a book, and Brian sounded like he could not have been more different from me – him being a middle-aged white man who lives a secluded life without any friends or family. The only thing we seem to have in common was…
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Arrangements in Blue
In this memoir, poet Amy Key takes the lovely pretext of Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue to explore various aspects of her own life and relationships. Each chapter, guided by a song lyric, focuses on something different: building a home, her relationships to parents and grandparents, her friendships, her romantic and sexual relationships, and her…
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A Flat Place
I read A Flat Place with mountains at my back and the sea before me. By the time I’d finished I was paying luminous attention to both. This is a book that could fit many categories or none – that is to say, the most interesting kind of book. Memoir, nature writing, literary criticism, writing…
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The Home Child
In this verse novel, Liz Berry imagines the life of her great-aunt Eliza Showell, who was taken from her home in England at the age of 11 after her mother’s death and forcibly sent to Canada to work as an indentured servant, or “Home Child.” The premise is tragic. Much of the book explores Eliza’s…
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The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party is the third of Mauvignier’s twelve novels to be translated into English, and this International Booker longlist title gained the Fitzcarraldo seal of approval. I’m a fast reader at the best of times, but I can’t remember a book that left me averaging over 150 pages a day; the pacing and gripping…
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Time Shelter
This year’s International Booker Prize winner is a strangely beguiling work in the tradition of Calvino and Borges, if much less esoteric. Our narrator is a novelist struggling to write meaningfully about memory. Along the way he meets Gaustine, a flaneur doctor-philosopher who decides to set up the clinic of the past, a place that…
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The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Philyaw’s debut short story collection took the world by storm when it was first published in 2020, and I can only hope it does so again now that it’s out in paperback. Comprised of nine stories of varied lengths and structures, the book explores a wide spectrum of emotions, yet remains cohesive in its examination…
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The Mountain in the Sea
In his debut science fiction novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler tells 3 intertwined stories that explore the potential ramifications of technological advances on emotional, social, political and ecological scales. In the main plot, we follow Dr. Ha Nguyen, an expert in octopus biology and psychology, who is sent to a remote Vietnamese…