In Iris Murdoch’s Henry and Cato (1976), Henry Marshalson inherits the family estate when his brother Sandy dies. Henry returns to the home where his mother Gerda still lives, with her kinda-sycophantic admirer, Lucius. Cato lives nearby. So does Colette. Stephanie does not, but, because of her pre-existing
In which I discuss recent reading which deserves particular attention: two novels, spanning an African immigrant’s contemporary experience in London and a trio of English sisters’ experience of the interwar years, and a graphic memoir spanning a young boy’s experiences in Syria, France and Libya. In Harare North (2009), Brian
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) I thought the footnotes would make it fun (like in a Steven Haywood short story); I was more focussed on the ‘wondrous’ than the warning of brevity. In fact, Oscar’s life emerges from dictatorship and constricted choices, and you
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life (2017) Arranged as though composed over a twelve-month period, this would seem to be the perfect book to read slowly, meditatively. To allow the pages
Canada specializes in a kind of "underhanded racism", which is "as Canadian as maple syrup". This is displayed in B. Denham Jolly's memoir, alongside the story of his life, from early days in Jamaica to his seventieth decade. Life in Jamaica was racialized, too, but more openly and, for
