Category: Fiction

This book starts with a death, then proceeds to a mystery: Bluma Lennon, a professor at Cambridge, is walking down the street while reading, and she’s struck by a car and killed. A few months later, the narrator of the book (who’s taken over Bluma’s office and courseload, and who’s not entirely disinterested—he was her…

It was the cover of this book, that particular yellow and the three shelves of interestingly-shaped bottles with their lovely old labels, that made me pick it up from a pile of books someone left in the lobby of the apartment building where I live. It sat on my shelf for a few months, and…

I like how this book starts, the way the first sentence takes you immediately into a place of questions or uncertainty or play: “Step inside and take a look, or perhaps he said a book, sweeping his magic wand in a semicircle in front of him” (3). The story is structured as a walk through…

The Editor’s Note describes this book as “an uneasy synthesis between fiction and journal, confession and travel guide”: it’s the story of Avignon, a walled city seen from outside and in, Avignon as object, as something to be explored, but also Avignon as a place to be skirted around, passed through, a place connecting points…

When my hold on All Clear finally came in at the library, I realized I hadn’t planned ahead enough to be able to re-read Blackout, as I thought I might want to. (I read Blackout back in May.) But I figured I’d go ahead and read All Clear anyhow, hoping that Connie Willis would remind…

This book, with its shifty chronology and its disorientation and its self-consciously literary style might seem over-the-top or pretentious or off-putting, especially at the start, when you don’t quite know what on earth you’re reading. But Catton’s writing, and the story, are engrossing enough that it worked for me. The book might be said to…

This slim volume, originally published in French in 1995 as La querelle des images, caught my eye at the library recently, though I hadn’t heard of this book or its author. Kilito, it turns out, is an author of both fiction and literary criticism; he’s Moroccan, and was born in 1945, near the tail end…

(Spoiler alert: it’s hard to talk about this book without mentioning some key plot points both from this book and the previous one, Changeless. So if you haven’t read this series and want to be surprised if/when you do, you might want to stop reading now.) At the start of this book, Alexia Maccon, newly…

1954: Mrs Hawkins, 28, is a young war widow, who lives in a South Kensington rooming-house and works as a proofreader and “literary adviser” at a small publishing house. The publishing house is barely hanging on; when secretaries and clerks leave they’re not replaced, and everyone who’s left is doing multiple jobs. And it’s not…