Difference between revisions of "LITERARY FICTION"

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(Created page with "agen, [https://4dprize.company.site https://4dprize.company.site]. HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead (Fleet £16.99, 336 pp)<br>HARLEM SHUFFLE<br>by (Fleet £16.99,...")
 
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agen, [https://4dprize.company.site https://4dprize.company.site].          HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead (Fleet £16.99, 336 pp)<br>HARLEM SHUFFLE<br>by (Fleet £16.99, 336 pp)<br>Whitehead has long been a fixture of the U.S. literary scene but he only became a household name among UK readers with the publication of his Pulitzer-winning slavery tale The Underground Railroad in 2016.<br>He followed that with The Nickel Boys, an unforgettable gut-punch of a novel based on the real-life institutional abuse of black boys in 1960s .<br>His new novel starts in a gentler groove. A kind of low-key gangster epic set in the segregated New York of the 1950s, it follows Ray, a black furniture salesman whose attempts to make a living for his young family are thwarted by the increasingly bloody spillover from his after-hours activity as a fence for stolen jewellery.<br>Anti-hero and everyman, Whitehead's compellingly complex protagonist stands at the heart of a rich period panorama lit up by explosive surges of drama. The story's lack of signposting demands maximal concentration — be warned — but it's absolutely worth it.<br>  RELATED ARTICLES              Share this article Share           A CALLING FOR CHARLIE BARNES by Joshua Ferris (Viking £16.99, 352 pp)<br>A CALLING FOR [https://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=usagov&query=CHARLIE CHARLIE] BARNES<br>by (Viking £16.99, 352 pp)<br>U.S. author Ferris made a splash with his 2007 debut Then We Came To The End, an office satire told in the third-person plural. Yet his subsequent bittersweet comedies have tended to meet a cooler reception, and his latest novel is another typically mixed bag.<br>It centres on Charlie, 68, a serially divorced American wheeler-dealer who, after a cancer diagnosis, seeks to right a lifetime of wrongs, including a financial scheme that left clients ruinously out of pocket.<br>Set against the 2008 crash, his story symbolises the wider reckoning that followed the subprime mortgage crisis. A further dimension comes courtesy of Charlie's son, Jake, a novelist who (you guessed it) is writing the book we're reading. But for all the layers, the book ends up a kind of zany tearjerker — even Jake worries that it might be mawkish, which is one of the things that makes you think Ferris is being too cute for his own good.<br>         THE MAKING OF INCARNATION by Tom McCarthy (Cape £16.99, 336 pp)<br>THE MAKING OF INCARNATION<br>by (Cape £16.99, 336 pp)<br>McCarthy is best known for Remainder, his 2005 cult hit about a man who uses the compensation for a brain injury to re-stage his own life in elaborate detail.<br>His fiction can be almost adversarially austere, keener on ideas than individuals, and it's fair to say he's an acquired taste.<br>The title of his head-spinning new novel refers to the development of a Star Wars-like blockbuster movie at the heart of a quest plot involving various shadowy agencies eyeing the film's motion-capture technology.<br>Among them is ‘mo-cap' expert, Mark, hunting a box missing from the archives of Lillian Gilbreth, a real-life American psychologist who sought to boost workers' productivity by studying how they moved.<br>Essentially a gargantuan riff on the conspiratorial seductions of pattern recognition, the book is sustained by the peculiar thrill of McCarthy's icy present-tense narration, crammed with the kind of scientific minutiae that would make other novelists run for the hills.<br>To buy any book reviewed here, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193<br><br><br><br><br>data-track-module="am-external-links^external-links"><br>Read more:<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>DM.later('bundle', function()<br>DM.has('external-source-links', 'externalLinkTracker');<br>);
A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS by Polly Samson (Bloomsbury £14.99, 368 pp)<br>A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS<br>by Polly Samson<br>(Bloomsbury £14.99, 368 pp)<br>The relationship between Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, for whom he wrote So Long, [https://www.bing.com/search?q=Marianne&form=MSNNWS&mkt=en-us&pq=Marianne Marianne] among others, has already been told on film and it appears again in Polly Samson's heady new novel, set among the Bohemian enclave of artists and writers that gathered on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s.<br>It's narrated by Erica, a newly motherless teenager who has escaped the [https://realitysandwich.com/_search/?search=tyrannical%20gloom tyrannical gloom] of her grief-stricken father to travel to Hydra to track down her mother's best friend, Charmian Clift, the real-life Australian feminist writer who lived on Hydra with her family for several increasingly chaotic years.<br>To Erica's unworldly eyes, the boozy freedom, sexual permissiveness and arty decadence of Clift's circle is utterly beguiling,  [https://hydraclubbioknikokex7njhwuahc2l67lfiz7z36md2jvopda7hidra-onion.com hydraclubbioknikokex7njhwuahc2l67lfiz7z36md2jvopda7nchid.onion] and Samson recreates it all in sensorial detail, overlaying descriptions of sea and heat, fruit and sunshine in ways that seem to replicate the effect of light through a stained glass window.<br>This is a troubling portrait of innocence lost, even if the group's destructive impact on their neglected children never comes sufficiently into view.<br>  RELATED ARTICLES              Share this article Share   LOVE AFTER LOVE<br>by Ingrid Persaud<br>(Faber £14.99, 416 pp)<br>         LOVE AFTER LOVE by Ingrid Persaud (Faber £14.99, 416 pp)<br>This highly affecting novel maps the love and tribulations over several years within an alternative, ramshackle family set-up in Trinidad: Miss Betty, finally free of her abusive, drunk husband after he fell down the stairs, and Mr Chetan, her lodger, who is gay at a time on the island when being that is a dangerous thing.<br>Simultaneously enriching and complicating their lives is Miss Betty's adored son Solo who, as a teenager, discovers something about his mother he finds so traumatic that he flees to New York where he ekes out an existence as an illegal immigrant while trying to conceal a self-harm addiction.<br>Using alternate chapters, BBC short-story winner Persaud captures her characters' individual voices, their love affairs and estrangements from each other with a winning mix of Trinidadian patois and hard-bitten poetry, although she can't stop her story starting to badly straggle in the latter half.<br>The climax, though, is dreadful and powerful, and the resolution all the more poignant for being so hard won.<br>THE OTHER'S GOLD<br>by Elizabeth Ames<br>(Pushkin £12.99, 368 pp)<br>         THE OTHER'S GOLD by Elizabeth Ames (Pushkin £12.99, 368 pp)<br>Four students meet at college and form an immediate bond in Elizabeth Ames's smoothly written but dissatisfying novel about the ethical consequences of rash decisions.<br>Alice is a medical student haunted by injuries she intentionally inflicted on her brother when she was 12; gorgeous-looking Margaret turns heads wherever she goes; Ji Sun is a hugely wealthy Korean who in her final year accuses a professor of sexual harassment while Lainey is intent on a life of political activism.<br>Over the course of their lives, Ames keeps adjusting the lens on the relationships through a series of moral dilemmas that affect how each of them sees the other.<br><br>Yet while she writes confidently and insightfully about the complexities of female friendship, her tack is emotional rather than philosophical, while her novel feels both schematic and frustratingly wayward.<br>

Latest revision as of 00:48, 10 April 2022

A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS by Polly Samson (Bloomsbury £14.99, 368 pp)
A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS
by Polly Samson
(Bloomsbury £14.99, 368 pp)
The relationship between Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, for whom he wrote So Long, Marianne among others, has already been told on film and it appears again in Polly Samson's heady new novel, set among the Bohemian enclave of artists and writers that gathered on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s.
It's narrated by Erica, a newly motherless teenager who has escaped the tyrannical gloom of her grief-stricken father to travel to Hydra to track down her mother's best friend, Charmian Clift, the real-life Australian feminist writer who lived on Hydra with her family for several increasingly chaotic years.
To Erica's unworldly eyes, the boozy freedom, sexual permissiveness and arty decadence of Clift's circle is utterly beguiling, hydraclubbioknikokex7njhwuahc2l67lfiz7z36md2jvopda7nchid.onion and Samson recreates it all in sensorial detail, overlaying descriptions of sea and heat, fruit and sunshine in ways that seem to replicate the effect of light through a stained glass window.
This is a troubling portrait of innocence lost, even if the group's destructive impact on their neglected children never comes sufficiently into view.
RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Ingrid Persaud
(Faber £14.99, 416 pp)
LOVE AFTER LOVE by Ingrid Persaud (Faber £14.99, 416 pp)
This highly affecting novel maps the love and tribulations over several years within an alternative, ramshackle family set-up in Trinidad: Miss Betty, finally free of her abusive, drunk husband after he fell down the stairs, and Mr Chetan, her lodger, who is gay at a time on the island when being that is a dangerous thing.
Simultaneously enriching and complicating their lives is Miss Betty's adored son Solo who, as a teenager, discovers something about his mother he finds so traumatic that he flees to New York where he ekes out an existence as an illegal immigrant while trying to conceal a self-harm addiction.
Using alternate chapters, BBC short-story winner Persaud captures her characters' individual voices, their love affairs and estrangements from each other with a winning mix of Trinidadian patois and hard-bitten poetry, although she can't stop her story starting to badly straggle in the latter half.
The climax, though, is dreadful and powerful, and the resolution all the more poignant for being so hard won.
THE OTHER'S GOLD
by Elizabeth Ames
(Pushkin £12.99, 368 pp)
THE OTHER'S GOLD by Elizabeth Ames (Pushkin £12.99, 368 pp)
Four students meet at college and form an immediate bond in Elizabeth Ames's smoothly written but dissatisfying novel about the ethical consequences of rash decisions.
Alice is a medical student haunted by injuries she intentionally inflicted on her brother when she was 12; gorgeous-looking Margaret turns heads wherever she goes; Ji Sun is a hugely wealthy Korean who in her final year accuses a professor of sexual harassment while Lainey is intent on a life of political activism.
Over the course of their lives, Ames keeps adjusting the lens on the relationships through a series of moral dilemmas that affect how each of them sees the other.

Yet while she writes confidently and insightfully about the complexities of female friendship, her tack is emotional rather than philosophical, while her novel feels both schematic and frustratingly wayward.

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