reviews

I vaguely remembered Kate Pullinger’s name as the surprise winner of the GG for fiction a few years back, with a historical novel called ‘The Mistress of Nothing’. The blurb for her new novel ‘Forest Green’ didn’t really grab me at first, but now in late summer, with the book pile thinning, I thought I’d give this story set in the Depression-era Okanagan a try.

They say that summer is the time for light reading. If light means mindless or predictable, no thanks. But if light means comic, then I’m in. Here are two comic novels I thoroughly enjoyed this summer.

Each of the first four chapters of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of three black British women whose lives are connected in different ways.

A lot of fine readers I know really liked Vanessa and Her Sister, a fictional recreation of the lives of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. But I resisted it, for some reason. I often dislike fictionalized biographies of my literary heroes – though David Lodge’s efforts in that genre are exceptional. However, when tidying shelves in the store during the Christmas rush, I stumbled upon a new title by an author I love, Sigrid Nunez.

I hardly know what to say about Five Wives. I didn’t love it, I didn’t enjoy it, but I certainly admired it. What a magic trick Thomas pulls off here!

In this beautiful novel, translated from the German, Richard is a retired and widowed Classics professor whose narrow existence is forever changed by his encounter with North African refugees stranded in Berlin.

The title of this novel is a deft play on words: in this story of an Iranian dissident family forced into exile in Paris in 1981 after the Islamist revolution, Kimia Sadr is not only separated from her “oriental” identity, but she, and her whole family, are “disoriented” by the loss of all that is familiar and by the strangeness of a new language and culture…

Perhaps this novel of urban indigenous life in Oakland falls into the category of what James Baldwin calls the “protest novel” – less a literary work than a “catalogue of violence”. Certainly the fraught life stories of the different characters in the first half of the book are bleak, violent and sad. When the characters gather at a powwow, the suffering and chaos that result seem inevitable. For me, Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water and Medicine River , and Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce do a much more nuanced job of telling the story of indigenous peoples in the modern world.

A finely observed moment in the lives of a long married Irish couple, each with secret yearnings.

This is a delightful read. Our host on a transatlantic sea voyage is Frankie, an autistic six year old who has stowed away on the ship after the death of his mother. Holdstock does a marvelous job of taking the reader inside Frankie’s strange and scary and wonderful world.

The story starts in the present with a pretty icky family situation then plunges into the mythological ancient world with a brief sidetrack to Shakespearean London. It took me a while to get into this novel by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but once I did, I was totally entranced, hooked and reeled right in. Immensely powerful, dramatic and satisfying.

If you read this novel properly, it will change your life…

Julie Schumacher brings back Jason Fitger, the hapless academic hero of Dear Committee Members.

All the hype is dead on. This novel and this writer are extraordinary.