Fiction

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Wilful Disregard

Love, in theory

Ester Nilsson, respected poet and writer, has spent too much time being an intellectual and too little being a human. Everything changes when she falls head-over-heals in love with successful artist Hugo Rask. But how will Ester reconcile her critical/analytical brain with her biological urges? And what are Hugo’s intentions? Is he looking for love or just someone to stroke his ego? I was engrossed by Andersson’s intelligent and wickedly funny portrayal of the nature of relationships. A book for anyone who has loved without being loved back.

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The Lido by Libby Page

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The Lido

A charming summer read

There’s nothing new or stand-out special here but somehow this manages to be a happy heart-warming book. Featuring stock characters and an abundance of clichés, it also encompasses some of the big themes that several books of the moment (Eleanor Oliphant I’m looking at you) favour. Loneliness, anxiety, community spirit and kindness all make an appearance with a dash of gentrification issues and activism.

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Circe by Madeline Miller

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Circe

A spellbinding retelling of the story of the witch from classical mythology

Circe. If you cast your mind back to school you may remember her as the witch on whose island Odysseus and his crew washed up on their long journey back from the Trojan War, and wasn’t there something about turning men to pigs and, um, did Odysseus have an affair with her? If you have ever wondered why she lived alone on that island, what made her a sorceress, what happened to her after Odysseus left her to go back to his wife – indeed if you have ever wondered about the reality behind the headline story of any woman who plays a bit part in the (hi)story of men – you have an absolute treat in store with this book.

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Less

Playful Pulitzer Prize winner

Arthur Less is having a massive mid-life crisis. His last book proposal has been turned down, his boyfriend Freddy of eight years has dumped him only to announce he will marry his new beau instead. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the big five-O is lurking on the horizon. What to do? Escape seems the sensible option. Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which won the Pulitzer Prize last week, gets off to a bit of a slow start but picks up once Arthur hits the shores of Europe. A perfectly pitched comic portrayal of other cultures through the eyes of an American. I grew fond of anti-hero Arthur, his insecurities and fumbling efforts to rebuild his life. A heart-warming, funny and original read.

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Pachinko

Faltering family saga

Han Kang’s quirky Booker Prize winning The Vegetarian opened my, and I suspect many other’s, eyes to South Korean literature. I was curious, then, when Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a Korean-American, came out to rave reviews. Especially, as I have a soft spot for epic family sagas, the kind that sucks you in and makes you cry when you finish as you feel you’ve become a part of the family. However, Pachinko has turned out to be a tricky book to write about. It has many strong points but almost as many faults. I learned about the immigrant experience, Japanese racism towards Koreans, but missed some more historical context. There were characters in this book I really felt I got to know while others remained like card-board cut-outs. All in all, an uneven reading experience but one which still, somehow, managed to keep me going.

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On Chesil Beach

A nightmare of a wedding night

Edward and Florence are about to consummate their marriage, Edward has been waiting for this moment since he first laid eyes on her, Florence has been dreading it. Few authors can slow down time to a snail’s pace and still make gripping writing quite like Ian McEwan. His several pages long description of a disastrous kiss in On Chesil Beach will have you glued. Sexual mores of the early 1960s, class, failure of communication and deep love mix in a testing cocktail in McEwan’s book. Read it now, before it comes out as a film in May.

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Go, Went, Gone

A hauntingly beautiful novel about one of the most important issues of our time

This is a book that offers an intelligent fictionalised response to the refugee crisis by distilling the unimaginable scale and horror of a worldwide problem to the personal stories of a few people, played out in today’s Berlin. Full of generosity and humanity, it manages to be wide‐ranging and universal and yet astonishingly simple.

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Shyness and Dignity

A Norwegian Stoner

Meet Elias Rukla, teacher of Norwegian to a bunch of bored teenagers at Fagerborg Secondary School in Oslo. Elias is about to destroy 25 years of hard work and his reputation, publicly and humiliatingly, in front of the whole school. Why is Elias boiling over? Find out in this darkly funny, captivating deep dive into the psyche of a man who comes face to face with his entire existence.

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The Only Story

Endless love?

It’s the 1960s, 19-year-old university student Paul is home on summer holiday. Bored and fed up of by his parents’ suburban conventionality Paul reluctantly goes along when his mum suggests he joins the tennis club to meet a ‘Caroline’. Instead, he meets Susan Macleod, 48-year-old unhappily married mum of two. A beautiful and harrowing love story ensues, one that will dominate the rest of Paul’s life. Julian Barnes fans will want to read The Only Story, if I were new to Barnes, though, I’m not sure this is where I would start.

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Sisters

Torn apart by jealousy

Our unnamed narrator, the second wife of a successful Wall Street bond trader, is consumed with jealously for the first wife – ‘she’ – in this short novel, where the classic direction of jealousy is reversed. She is composed, blonde, tall and ‘lovely’, a talented musician with two exceptionally bright kids. ‘I’ is everything she’s not. A stirring portrayal of jealousy, emotional neglect and obsession, easily read in one sitting.

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