Lot by Bryan Washington was my book of the year in 2019 and you can read that review here and I have been eagerly awaiting his novel Memorial for some time, staring wide eyed with delight at the announcements as they etched closer to a release date – and then the day was finally here,
George Saunders, lauded for his short stories and winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, has been a teacher on the Syracuse University MFA creative writing program since 1997. This book is based on one of his Syracuse courses on Russian literature. A Swim in a Pond includes seven classic
Here’s an interesting premise for a thriller: three students are brutally attacked and lynched by a mob in the Nigerian university town of Okriki. Everybody knows who did it – the whole thing was captured on social media – but nobody knows why. Dr Philip Taiwo, a psychologist and expert on the behaviour of crowds,
Informative and necessary, Abdulrazak Gurnah uses stripped back prose to tell the stories of Hamza, Ilyas and Afiya in his insightful new novel, Afterlives. It’s a satisfying linear tale, and one that doesn’t need any literary embellishments to bring the narrative to life. Gurnah takes us through the lives of his characters in a simple, effective
What a feast of delights awaits us the reader in this years BBC National Short Story Award 2020 from Comma Press – I’m a huge fan of this series as I’m a huge fan of the short story form and well this year we are treated to some great voices, some old and some new
This Along Could Save Us is a flash fiction collection of 51, yes 51 short pieces of flash. The book is a real quick read and works as a great palate cleanser between larger books, the stories aren’t very deep but are enjoyable with the flow of Prinzi’s prose, but for me, the collection was
Drabbles – A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space. Drabbles are fiction that is 100 words long. I was first introduced to these by my good
Whispers in the Dark by Laurel Hightower is pretty damn good, actually it’s pretty stunning – and to think this was her debut, bloody hell! Fierce storytelling, prose to die for, and a story that is achingly brutal; whilst also populated by characters that are really relatable, even the secondary cast of characters – all
T.C. Parker delivers the creeping unease of past masters with a story that is as beguiling as it is terrifying – Salt Blood is a story that keeps on giving from the very first page! Salt Blood is an interesting concept for a book and one that seems far removed from the brooding cover (although
Animalistic, thrilling, and intense, Tim Binding’s Beneath the Trees of Eden contains a plethora of beautiful and complicated relationships, set against the real and raw portrayal of death. Our characters skirt the fringes of society and live on their own terms – but at what cost? Binding challenges us to reconsider what ‘Eden’ really is,
