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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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The Wonder Down Under – A User’s Guide to the Vagina

All the things you never dared ask

It’s time to demystify the female genitals. Oslo-based medical students and sex educators Dr Nina Brochmann and Ellen Støkken Dahl have decided to lift the veil. With frankness and humour, Brochmann and Dahl tackle periods, discharge, douchebags, contraception, fertility and sex, in all shapes and forms, plus a host of other issues. A breath of fresh air from two hugely inspirational young women, The Wonder Down Under – A User’s Guide to the Vagina has been translated to 33 languages and sailed straight onto the German and French best-seller lists. Is Britain ready for it?

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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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Lullaby

A psychological thriller about the Mary Poppins from hell

‘The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.’ The chilling opening line of this hugely hyped thriller about a killer nanny leaves you in no doubt about its horrific ending. And this horrible premise certainly doesn’t make for an easy read. Touted as the next Gone Girl, the first of Leila Slimani’s novels to be translated into English and winner of the prestigious French literary prize, The Prix Goncourt, does Lullaby (American title – The Perfect Nanny) deserve the hype?

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Mrs Osmond

A worthy sequel to Henry James's great classic

Some books just scream out for sequels. None more so than Henry James’s 19th century classic The Portrait of Lady which ends with heroine Isabel Archer facing the choice between going back to her adulterous, deceiving husband or scandalising society by leaving him. Brave is the author who picks up James’s pen and continues his masterpiece, but John Banville does it and, somehow, manages to pull it off.

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Little Fires Everywhere

Clever on the shifting dynamics of family life

The teenage Pearl and her artistic mother Mia move into a rented house owned by a wealthy family in a smarter area of the same Ohio neighbourhood. The lives of both families become entwined in healthy and not‐so‐healthy ways in a deceptively simple tale about motherhood, belonging, responsibility, and standing up for what you believe in.

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