Tag: fiction

UncategorizedLeave a comment

One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

rrn69

The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life. Elin Anna Lanna’s novel The Home of the Drowned, traces the story of a family- Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Anne – from 1942 to 1982. At a nearby lake recently dammed to build a hydroelectric power station floods their village. Their home, a type of hut called a goahti, is being submerged by the water. The Sámi are an indigenous people who historically inhabited northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. Due to state-sanctioned assimilation policies over the … Continue reading One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Memoir of self-development

rrn69

When Irish writer, Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. But his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at least he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia liveup to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to is author, what it enabled and denied between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when … Continue reading Memoir of self-development

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

rrn69

The Left and the Lucky is the moving large-hearted story of a young boy in danger of slipping through society’s cracks and the unlikely father figure who takes him under his wing. “And try to breathe, man. You gotta remember to breathe. You won’t get so panicky if you can remember that.” This novel is about neighbourliness in Portland, Oregon. Eddie Wilkens runs his own house-painting business ( a job Vlautin did in his thirties while trying to make it as a writer and musician). Eddie primes and refreshes the walls and windows of well-heeled locals, while covering up the cracks … Continue reading Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Monsters within her…

rrn69

Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care … Continue reading Monsters within her…

Uncategorized1 Comment

Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

rrn69

Erica Wagner’s Wash tells the story of a boy Washington Roebling growing up in Pennsylvania under the eye of a brutal but brilliant father. He is a young man at college, enduring the choices that have been made for him and finding brightness and beauty all the same. He is a soldier in a dreadful war who- despite that awful conflict- finds an extraordinary woman who was the love of his life, and her tale inextricably twines with is. He is an engineer who builds one of the great wonders of the modern world. His life holds the possible and … Continue reading Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

Uncategorized1 Comment

Mysteries of male friendship

rrn69

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

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Can a fox be tamed? 

rrn69

While some of us crave crime and violence or in depth factual books on politicsor finance as well as self help bibles, some of us feel enlightened and soothedby human interest stories which follow relatively ordinary people and their lifeexperiences especially if animals are involved.So if you want to take a side step and read about Wilf and his foxy friendtogether with elaborate characterisations of many people vital in the story trythis novel which is a debut for Richard Tyrrell who has a degree inPharmacology and has worked as a book reviewer for mainstreet papers andwas a finalist in The … Continue reading Can a fox be tamed? 

Uncategorized1 Comment

Job nightmare…

rrn69

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…

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Metamorphosis and morality…

rrn69

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…

Uncategorized1 Comment

A world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions

rrn69

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2026, author Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains, is a landmark Bulgarian queer novel, secrets readers into a rural Albanian village where to this day, the Kanun of Leké dukagjini- a collection of Archaic laws- looms over the lives of villagers with the same haunting presence to the surrounding mountains. Bekija, painfully aware of why she cannot have what she most wants, chooses to become a “sworn virgin, setting off a bloody and heart-breaking chain of events that shatters a family and destroys a cherished relationship, but also reveals how trauma can lead to vital, … Continue reading A world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions