About the Book: Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and … Continue reading Book Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Literary Fiction
Book Review: The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
About the Book: From the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies and powered with Boyne's characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of … Continue reading Book Review: The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
Book Review: The Magician by Colm Tóibín
About the Book: When the Great War breaks out in 1914 Thomas Mann, like so many of his fellow countrymen, is fired up with patriotism. He imagines the Germany of great literature and music, which had drawn him away from the stifling, conservative town of his childhood, might be a source of pride once again. … Continue reading Book Review: The Magician by Colm Tóibín
Book Review: The Riviera House by Natasha Lester
About the Book: Paris, 1939: While working at the Louvre, Eliane Dufort falls for talented painter Xavier. But when the Nazis occupy the city, Xavier leaves for England and Eliane must send her sisters to the country. Broken-hearted, she finds herself working with the mysterious Rose Valland on a dangerous secret mission for the French … Continue reading Book Review: The Riviera House by Natasha Lester
Book Review: People Like Them by Samira Sedira (trans. Lara Vergnaud)
About the Book: Winner of the Prix Eugène Dabit There are no monsters. Only humans. Anna and Constant Guillot and their two daughters live in the peaceful, remote mountain village of Carmac. Everyone in Carmac knows each other, leading simple lives mostly unaffected by the outside world – that is until Bakary and Sylvia Langlois … Continue reading Book Review: People Like Them by Samira Sedira (trans. Lara Vergnaud)
Book Review: Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
About the Book: The new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author: a haunting portrait of a woman, her decisions, her conversations, her solitariness, in a beautiful and lonely Italian city. The woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, … Continue reading Book Review: Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Book Review: Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
About the Book: From the author of the international bestseller Migrations comes a pulse-pounding new novel set in the wild Scottish Highlands. Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team tasked with reintroducing fourteen grey wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, … Continue reading Book Review: Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
Book Review: Still Life by Sarah Winman
About the Book: 1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and … Continue reading Book Review: Still Life by Sarah Winman
Book Review: Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
About the Book: Winner of the Prix Robert Walser — a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author. It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from … Continue reading Book Review: Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Book Review: The Golden Book by Kate Ryan
About the Book: It’s the 1980s, and in their small coastal town, Ali and her best friend, Jessie, are on the cusp. With ‘The Golden Book’, a journal of incantation and risk taking as their record, they begin to chafe at the restrictions put on them by teachers, parents, each other. Then Jessie suffers a … Continue reading Book Review: The Golden Book by Kate Ryan
