Search Results for: this is pleasure

This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill

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This is Pleasure

A #MeToo Too Far?

Here’s one to set off a fiery debate around the dinner table. Now that the first storm around #MeToo has settled, This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill takes a step back and looks at the fallout. Quin, a successful, charming publisher, has been a huge flirt his entire adult life. While never explicitly abusing his power, Quin has always operated at the very edge of acceptable behaviour (sometimes overstepping it). It has now come back to haunt him. Many of us have had a Quin in our lives. What do we think of this one?

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Books set in New York City

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Books set in New York City

Having spent the better part of my 20s living in New York City, I have a huge soft spot for this iconic place. I crave books that bring back the noises, the buzz, the beauty, the people and the grittiness of the city.  Here’s a selection of some of the very best ones.

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Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Victorian Psycho

An outrageous unravelling

For those with a deliciously dark sense of humour and a taste for the macabre, Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito is an unmissable treat. Set in 19th-century England, this is the tale of Miss Winifred Notty, both demure governess and vengeful murderess. Arriving at her new placement with the well-to-do Pounds family, Winifred tells us that in three months time everyone in the house will be dead. Cue a journey into the mind of  a female psychopath in a cleverly parodic novel that borrows brilliantly from Victorian literature (with a nod to Charles Dickens, in particular). This sensationally cinematic book is already in the Hollywood movie pipeline.

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There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

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There Are Rivers in the Sky

Sweeping multi-narrative

A raindrop falling on the head of King Ashurbanipal in the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh 2600 years ago kicks off the sweeping novel There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. The drop of water resurfaces as a snowflake on the tongue on a newborn baby on the banks of the river Thames in 1840, in a water bottle in Iraq in 2014 and, finally, as a teardrop on a houseboat in London in 2018. Shafak interweaves three stories to make an epic, enjoyable journey through time and geographies.

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Held by Anne Michaels

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Held

What will survive of us

A poetic gem on this year’s pleasingly eclectic Booker Prize Longlist, Held by Anne Michaels explores the many ways that the dead walk alongside us. Spanning time and space, her haunting and humane novel portrays four generations of one family and how their choices, traumas, and loves resonate through decades, if not centuries. From a World War I soldier hovering between life and death on the battlefield, to his granddaughter’s career as a war medic and her own bequeathal, Michaels threads their lives together in a meditation on mortality and inherited history.

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Brian by Jeremy Cooper

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Brian

Herzog, Truffaut, and Brian from Kentish Town

We’re big fans of London publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and their championing of innovative and enduring fiction, enfolded in elegant Yves Klein Blue covers. Brian by Jeremy Cooper is the third of his works they’ve launched into the world, and a novel of rich interiority. It chronicles several decades of the sedate life of Brian, loner, Camden Council employee, and cinephile. Carrying past trauma and a lifelong sense of being different, in Cooper’s inspired melding of bittersweet fiction and film criticism, Brian is set to find solace and belonging at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank.

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Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

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Out Stealing Horses

Beautiful Norwegian novel of memory and acceptance

Approaching his twilight years, Trond Sander has fulfilled a lifelong yearning for rural solitude; a small house in the farthest reaches of eastern Norway, with a dog and the radio for companionship. The 21st century is hovering into view but Trond has no plans for Millennium celebration, instead anticipating a mellow, boozy evening in front of the fire. His new resolve to inhabit only the present moment is upended by the shocking appearance of a character from Trond’s past. In Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, a reckoning is long overdue with the psychic wounds and repercussions of childhood tragedy and loss.

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Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen

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Christ on a Bike

A twisty psychological tale of envy, materialism and neurosis

Seemingly set to wear the generation rent label into middle age, Cerys is stuck on the London treadmill of extortionate rents and squishing on the Central Line every morning for the pleasure of working a 50-hour week. Her uptight sister, Seren, believes Cerys is doomed to an impoverished old age due to sheer imprudence. Everything changes one drizzly day in Wales, when an act of kindness on Cerys’ part results in her inheriting a fabulous coastal property and a generous income for life. There is, of course, a grimly clever catch, and Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen presents a twisty psychological tale of envy, materialism and neurosis.

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What You Need To Be Warm by Neil Gaiman

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What You Need to be Warm

8-11 years

The gift of warmth this winter

In 2020, as winter approached, Neil Gaiman made a special request to his legions of social media followers, asking them to share memories that reminded them of warmth. Answers ranged from the pleasure of a baked potato on a chilly night, to the less tangible comfort of a smile from a stranger. In a bid to draw attention to those left out in the cold, particularly those fleeing from war or persecution, he wove these ideas into a scarf, a film, and here, casting a welcome glow, is the book, What You Need to be Warm by Neil Gaiman.

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