Category: Fiction

In this 2003 piece in the Guardian, Susan Hill is quoted as saying this: “It’s not plot that interests me, but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.” So it’s apt that the atmosphere and setting of this book were what made it a pleasure for me to read, while the plot,…

Ha’penny is set in the same world as Farthing (an alternate 1940s England in which WWII ended with a peace treaty and Hitler is still in power in Germany) and takes place shortly after that book ends. The structure is similar, with chapters of first-person narrative alternating with chapters of third-person narrative. Some of the…

One of the things I like most about The Magicians and The Magician’s Land is the way they play with the tropes of myth and fantasy and quest narratives, the way that the quests in those books are never entirely straightforward, the way that a world in which magic exists is not necessarily a world…

Farthing is a satisfying English-country-house murder-mystery set in an alternate 1949 in which England made peace with Hitler in 1941, and now exists across the Channel from the Third Reich. The book alternates, chapter by chapter, between the first-person narrative of Lucy Kahn, at whose parents’ house the murder takes place, and a third-person narrative…

This collection of linked stories set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen in the ’70s and ’80s does a great job of capturing a sense of place. The narrator of the first story puts it like this: “I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt…

In her preface to this reprint of her first novel, which was originally published in 1930, Kay Boyle writes that “the meaning of the book may perhaps be that there is always in life the necessity to choose,” which isn’t my favorite moral: I mean, yes, but sometimes the choice you get to make is…

Villa Bunker, a novella made of 133 numbered sections (ranging in length from a sentence to several pages each) is weird and interesting and pretty great to have read right after Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities—I felt there were moments when these two books complemented one another interestingly. Ronk’s book was concerned, in large part,…

If you’re looking for a novel that’s plot-driven or character driven, Every Day Is for the Thief (which was originally published in Nigeria in 2007, by Cassava Republic Press) is probably not the book for you. This is an episodic novel, a novel of vignettes and moments, a novel where the city of Lagos (which…

In his Translator’s Afterword, Vincent Kling describes The System of Vienna as a “parody-tribute to the art of autobiography as construct,” which is a good way of putting it (109). The book starts with the story of the narrator’s birth, as told to him by his mother: the language of it makes you aware of…

Two Serpents Rise is set in the same world as Three Parts Dead, but doesn’t follow the same characters: it isn’t even set in the same city. While Three Parts Dead centered on the city of Alt Coulumb, an old city still powered by an old god, Two Serpents Rise is set in Dresediel Lex,…