Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014) Reading. Then Not. Simon & Schuster, 2014 Sharp sentences. Jabbing thoughts. Unkindnesses bearing down. Book, set aside. Pause. And here is where the experience of reading A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing may end for many readers. Some, however,
Knopf, 2013 Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) “Naxalbari is an inspiration. It’s an impetus for change.” One brother in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel is a member of the Naxalbari movement, Udayan. His involvement with the far-left radical Communist group in Calcutta vitally impacts the entire family, even Subhash, who
Each of these novels considers a shattered state of being, whether the devastation plays out through the cycle of addiction or societal breakdown or international conflicts. The characters employ a variety of coping mechanisms and the authors' styles are diverse; Elizabeth Renzetti's Based on a True Story, Edan Lepucki's California and Audrey
Random House, 2013 The slippery question of time is often posed on the page. And with books, it’s different. In music, listeners are engaged at a pace dictated by the composer’s notation, beats counted as the bars pass, the audience arriving synchronously at the end of the piece.
Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
