It’s fitting that a story which includes the visionary figure of Buckminster Fuller is rooted in possibility rather than history: “It is not intended to follow the precise history of what was, but rather to imagine a story that might have been.” This note precedes the novel and sets
In the past, I've made large stacks of creepy reading with the RIP challenges in mind, but I have a habit of stacking up many lovely possibilities but then choosing different books altogether later on. Perhaps this is partly because books can surprise you and take you in unexpected directions.
Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother Translator Geoffrey Strachan (French) Graywolf Press, 2011 A Graywolf Press publication, a contender for The Tournament of Books, with a gorgeous and haunting cover image: all excellent reasons for picking up a copy of The Last Brother without reading a single word. And then you meet
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
