Tag: fiction

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Monsters within her…

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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…

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

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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

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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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Can a fox be tamed? 

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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? 

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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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A world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions

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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

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Sole witness to a deadly crime

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Ava Glass introduces Maya Landry, who’s seeking a fresh start deep in the Rocky Mountains of Montana after a messy divorce. When a senator is murdered, Landry’s sanctuary turns into a place of danger and she is forced on the run. She reinvents herself and moves to Texas to work as a barmaid and waitress.  She is relieved when she’s hired as a summer keeper of billionaire owned ski lodges left empty after snow season ends, and her new life of peace and isolation is going exactly as hope… until she stumbles across a dead body on the living room floor … Continue reading Sole witness to a deadly crime

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Who can truly face who they are?

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Edi is facing a disciplinary since her “incident” at work. Forty-seven years in Admin processing the newly dead is not how she foresaw eternity. The Delusions is the tale of a woman processing souls in the afterlife. In Arrivals, the newly dead must take the stages in order: first extract delusion; second, answer HR’s questionnaire truthfully. Yet who among them can truly face who they are? Who may never pass at all? As leader board numbers begin to rise at unprecedented rates, rumours begin to fly. Humans are about to become a banned race. The earth is going to be … Continue reading Who can truly face who they are?

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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