Inventive, powerful, thought-provoking. Each sentence is as beautifully and thoughtfully rendered as an entire poem. I loved everything about this book and cannot stop talking about it!
Reading this was like trying to catch your balance while roaming a cliffside. The unnamed narrator allows you to easily imagine yourself experiencing the events as they unfold eerily before you.
Lucy Clarke has taken what could be a tired thriller cliché-six friends celebrating a hen weekend on an isolated Greek island complete with simmering rivalries and secrets-and created a compelling look at women's complicated relationships and shared history.
Certainly someone will meet their end on those steep Greek cliffs, but others will find love, peace and redemption. All packaged in a perfect summer read.
These are amazingly bizarre, dream-like and surreal stories that surprise the reader not in their bizarre nature, but by slowly revealing themselves to be deeply grounded and beautifully heart-felt. Like the most potent of dreams, they are nonsensically unexplainable yet impossible to forget.
The author, having recently lost her son to suicide, transcends all the ordinary rules of grieving and constructs a timeless world in which she can speak with her son again. Their imagined conversations are so honest, yearning and specific that you feel as if they are in fact sitting in a room together once more. This is a gorgeous meditation on loss and the funny things it does to a person, reminding us that there is no "ordinary" way to grieve after all.
A striking debut novel equal parts art history and narrative, Activities of Daily Living juxtaposes the protagonist's study of performance artist Tehching Hsieh and her father's cognitive decline. This is a riveting work of fiction scrutinizing the possibility of art/meaning versus the inevitable slow squeeze of time and how one simply cannot exist without the other.
Truly exceptional.
I’ll be a mess if I can find a better novel this year than Gospodinov’s Time Shelter. Gaustine, a geriatric ward clinician, opens a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients that reproduces decades of the past in perfect detail. The treatment is wildly effective, and within the comfort of past eras, patients inhabit their former selves. Angela Rodel somehow manages an encyclopedia’s worth of obscure cultural references from across the globe, rending them with clarity and beauty. Gospodinov is a keen observer of both the melancholy of time’s passing and the slippery joy of nostalgia.
I’ve got a weak spot for a YA enemies-to-lovers romance, but the feud between the band kids and theater kids made this book irresistible. Kanter totally captures the complex overwhelming stress of high school…including how it breaks friendships as easily as it makes them.
Oh, and the best part? Kanter’s love for Jewish culture shines on every page.
More than a mere retelling, this is a stunning reweaving. With lush writing, sharp characters, and a clear affinity for her source, Nicola Griffith has spun anew a story steeped in ancient lore.
Spear is the Arthurian tale I have been longing for since the legends of Camelot and Albion first called to me: queer and beguiling and beautiful, offering a promise of belonging.
