Category: Fiction

James’s sentences are often exquisite: sentences as long as paragraphs, sentences full of commas, phrases nested like Russian dolls. His style forces me to slow down, to re-read passages, and I appreciate his pacing, his rhythm. Even the long slow middle of the book, a period of waiting for Kate and Merton and Milly, and…

Woolf’s first novel is full of luminous detail, perfect descriptin: a boat moving along a river, a thunderstorm, the way night falls or morning breaks. Familiar themes of aloneness, the inadequacy of language, the difficulty of communication: but here that’s all combined with the disconnect between the sexes, which makes this book feel frustratingly dated…

Perfectly faux-Victorian, the twists & turns of the mind & of prison corridors, allusive and delicious and dark. A story told in the form of diary entries, secrets and private thoughts.

A story told backwards; a story of how people came to be where (who) they are. The start of the first sentence: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the kind of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped […]” Elsewhere, Kay remarks that people’s pasts are “so much more interesting…

I read an advance reader’s copy of Suite Française in March: it only contained the first section of the two part book (it was meant to be five parts, like a symphony, but Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz and died before finishing it). “Storm in June,” the story of the Paris evacuation in 1940 and…

“Scraps and fragments,” swallows and starlings, bits of Shakespeare, bits of Byron, bits of Keats. Little pieces of literature and history that surface, little pieces of emotion, of meaning. The shifts in perspective, what is spoken and what is felt. Each person playing a role, whether aware of it or not; art and connection and…

The myth of Atlas, re-told. Weight & destiny & choice: how things seem inevitable, but what if they’re not?

A book full of wind and sea and salt. Silver, an orphan, is apprenticed to a lighthousekeeper to learn the trade, but of course, this being Jeanette Winterson, that’s only one of this book’s many stories. (There are always many stories, stories to hear and stories to tell.) There’s the story of Babel Dark, or…

Ways of displacing the self, ways of finding the self: writing words for other people (this novel’s protagonist is an “anonymous author”), walking through an unknown city, learning to speak a new launguage, falling in love.

As impossible to put down as Tipping the Velvet was, a story of petty thieves, scheming to get rich, plot twists and the question of who knows what, and when. And London, always London: the narrow streets of Southwark, the dome of St Paul’s and the polluted Thames.