Tag: book-reviews

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Mysteries of male friendship

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Andrew Meehan’s Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades. The story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian, a lonely teenager finds himself lodging with his father’s cousin, thirty-year-old actor Tommy Carmody in London. He needs to get away from the family home: his mother is dead and Ian and his father have not only buried her; they’ve buried the memory of her too, distracting themselves with anagram games.  “Eric Clapton, he said. Narcoleptic, I said.”  Tommy will be a change for Ian. He’s “What you ‘d call a character … Continue reading Mysteries of male friendship

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Job nightmare…

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Marcus Kliewer, a writer and stop-motion animator and a  new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater- and more dangerous- than  she ever could have imagined. His debut novel “We Used to Live Here began life as a serialised short story Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep Forum. Film rights were snapped up by Netflix, and it was acquired by Simon & Schuster for publication even before it had been extended into … Continue reading Job nightmare…

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Metamorphosis and morality…

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Silver polisher, Flora, a 40-year-old Londoner visiting her family in Mexico – where Aridjis spent some of her childhood, is bitten on the hand by their dog Diego, who knows her well, but he is old with cataracts and saw nothing but “a disembodied hand”. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia “three surgeries… each time it felt sawn in half and put back together”.  The hospital becomes a hermetic space for Flora, sealed off from the outside world. She meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two … Continue reading Metamorphosis and morality…

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Spiritual Reality

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Rev Dr Howard Worsley is a researcher, teacher and priest. With an English degree from Manchester, he pursued an MA in Theology at Nottingham, then a PHD in Education at Birmingham. This busy man is currently working as the Diocesan Director of Education for Southwell and Nottingham, as well as being the Chair of the National Association of Church Directors.  He has 3 sons, and loves exploring the world by canoe, bike or foot. In this book, he intends to uncover original visions seen by children which is sometimes termed “Spiritual Reality”.  To create this book, thirty families were selected after … Continue reading Spiritual Reality

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Lessons from the time loop saga

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In the fourth instalment of Balle’s expansive, Danish writer Solvej Balle’s speculative fiction septology, we pick up with Tara Selter, former antiquarian book dealer, who has been repeating the 18th of November for 1,892 days, over five years, According to her calculations, she is now about 35 years old and teems with new faces, new people and voices from every corner of the western world. She is no longer alone in her repetitions. In Book III, Tara met other people also trapped in the same repeating day, first sociologist Henry Dale, whom she encountered at a University lecture on Roman supply … Continue reading Lessons from the time loop saga

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Five repressed women humiliated by men, discover new paths

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Women Without Men, by Shahrnush Parsipur, now 80, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur’s unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. Five repressed women abandoned or humiliated by men, discover new, sometimes surreal paths for themselves. As societal expectations and the fear of spinsterhood weigh on, Iran tried and failed to silence Women Without Men ( Zanan bedun-e Mardan in Persian) exposed the brutality of Iranian regime and … Continue reading Five repressed women humiliated by men, discover new paths

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Family tensions amid America’s immigration policies

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Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, is a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration, where a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant- who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be. Shriver rages about the influx of illegal immigrants to America, but when asked if he writes op-eds about this, he replies “Oh no, no, no, no,.. I most certainly do not,”. Gloria Bonaventura, living in a sprawling house in Brooklyn with her 26-year-old son Nico, an Italian American engineering major  who spent  four years since graduation telling on the dime of his divorced mother of three, decides … Continue reading Family tensions amid America’s immigration policies

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Guilt and regret

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Fila, a protagonist of Michelle Steinbeck’s Favorita, receives an anonymous phone call from Italy telling her that her mother Magdalena is dead, her instinctive feeling is one of relief. Fila hasn’t seen her in years, not since she disgraced their family by advertising her brothel in the newspaper. Fila is already unmoored by the recent death of her grandmother Lavinia, who raised her. In Lavinia’s kitchen in Switzerland Fila now sits, listening to the voice on the “mortadella-coloured rotary telephone” that says “they say it’s because of her liver, but I can assure you that it was not her liver… … Continue reading Guilt and regret

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Focus on Parenting

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Narrator Sandra embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to her autistic son, who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious and deeply moving voyage of the body and the mind. “It was a strange experience, speaking to someone who didn’t tune in to you. It was like talking hallucinogens” Sandra said. Following a documentary producer who dies and desperately tries to rescue her child while her spirit still roams the earth, Amie Barrodale’s debut novel Trip as much about neurodivergence and the impossibility of human empathy as it is about the bizarreness of the afterlife. Trip is … Continue reading Focus on Parenting

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Redemptive power of friendship

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Set in 2011, Crux is a story of intense friendship between two Californian teenagers, bookish Dan and his near-feral best friend Tamma, a lesbian from the wrong side of the tracks and grit, two-down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock-climbing- from Gabriel Tallent, the New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling. Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert, are passionate climbers, one is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout, who spend their evenings and weekends conquering … Continue reading Redemptive power of friendship