One thing I love about Zadie Smith is her sensitivity to the small cataclysms of contemporary life. In the early chapters of Swing Time, for example, she observes the influence of repeated viewings on her generation. In my day, we saw a movie, at the movie theatre, once. Maybe twice…
The jacket copy alone wouldn’t have grabbed me—a historical novel of New York, set in the Depression and War years? The first female diver? Gangsters and Ziegfeld Follies? Uh uh…
What can I say? Jackson Brodie is back, as ambivalent and tortured and hella cool as ever. And as far as this reader is concerned, Kate Atkinson can do no wrong.
Quirky and strange tale of a Francophone couple whose lives are turned upside down when the husband suddenly disappears from his Silverado truck. Winters presents their dialogue in untranslated joual, but it somehow works even for a reader like me with only rudimentary high school French. Some very bizarre and deeply funny moments, especially as Agathe discovers “le rock and roll”.
Here’s a quiz: close your eyes. Remember a novel that moved you, stayed with you. What is it that you remember? Something shocking, violent, unexpected? Or something small and human and unexpected, yet so so true? Last May, the Globe...
This is a full, rich novel, informed by an acute awareness of race, class and gender. If the author seems a little too in love with her central character, that flaw is more than compensated for by the astuteness of her observations of contemporary American and African life as seen through the eyes of her central character, Ifemelu.