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One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
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In March of this year I picked up Paul Auster's Baumgartner in a bookshop in Brussels. Known to be a revered author (‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’), I hadn't yet read any of his books before. I decided to start digging into his body of work with his latest novel, released at the tail-end of 2023. Continue reading →
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In the wake of her new book All Fours lining the shelves of my go-to bookstore as of this month—and following her dazzling profile in The New Yorker, written by Alexandra Schwartz—I decided to re-read Miranda July's previous novel, The First Bad Man, published in 2015. It was her first novel, following 2007's No One Belongs Here More Than You (a collection of short stories). Continue reading →
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Paul Lynch – Prophet Song (2023)
APR 2024Paul Lynch was asked, during an event organised in Amsterdam, to read the first paragraph of his Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song. Happily obliging, he read that first paragraph: a sprawling, vivid text spanning multiple pages, setting the stage for the totalitarian version of Ireland we're about to meet, painting a picture of the moment Eilish Stack's life starts to unravel, and introducing us to his relentless style of writing. Continue reading →
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During the pandemic I discovered the joys of reading great nature writing. With the world in lockdown, books by Robert Macfarlane and Peter Matthiessen helped me travel to faraway destinations—places that, come to think of it, I wouldn’t dare visit even if I could. Continue reading →
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Jo Ann Beard – Cheri (2023)
FEB 2024In a way, I borrowed the stories and then tried to infuse them with metaphorical meaning. I wanted to experience, as a writer, what happens when you get all the way to your moment of death and then don’t die. Or in the case of Cheri, what happens on the march towards, and through, your own certain death.
— Jo Ann Beard (The Guardian)