Category: Fiction

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…

Changeless is the sequel to Soulless (which I wrote about here), and it starts out much better than that book did. The dialogue’s much smoother (fewer clunky surrounding phrases like “she stated”) and I grinned right away at the opening scene. Alexia, our sleeping heroine, wakes up to the sound of her husband shouting, and…

I first read about this book in the Goodreads newsletter last November; I was reminded of it again in the spring by this post over on A Work in Progress, but it’s taken me until now to get around to actually reading it. Before starting, my impressions of things it had going for it were…

I read and loved Monique Truong’s first novel, The Book of Salt, back in 2004, so I was excited to hear that she had a new novel out this year. The narrator of this one, Linda Hammerick, is a quirky person from a quirky family, which could be annoying but which I found pretty charming.…