About the Book: A heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship. Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of … Continue reading Book Review: Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
Contemporary Fiction
Book Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
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
Book Review: The Others by Mark Brandi
About the Book: On his eleventh birthday, Jacob's father gives him a diary. To write about things that happen. About what he and his father do on their farm. About the sheep, the crop, the fox and the dam. But Jacob knows some things should not be written down. Some things should not be remembered. … Continue reading Book Review: The Others by Mark Brandi
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: Freckles by Cecelia Ahern
About the Book: Five people. Five chances. One woman’s search for happiness. Allegra Bird’s arms are scattered with freckles, a gift from her beloved father. But despite her nickname, Freckles has never been able to join all the dots. So when a stranger tells her that everyone is the average of the five people they … Continue reading Book Review: Freckles by Cecelia Ahern
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: 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
Book Review: The Women’s Circle by Karyn Sepulveda
About the Book: Sydney, present day. Anna is released into the world after eight years in prison. The entirety of her possessions stuffed into a single plastic bag. The trauma of her past, a much heavier burden to carry. Feeling hopeless, isolated and deeply lonely, Anna attends an alternative support group; The Women’s Circle. But … Continue reading Book Review: The Women’s Circle by Karyn Sepulveda
