Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting (2010) Vintage Books, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) When readers meet Na Ga, the narrator of The Road to Wanting, she is preparing a noose. She uses a longyi, a simple tube of fabric that you
Tessa Hadley’s The London Train HarperCollins, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) It’s a little like Barbara Pym with trains, this second novel of Tessa Hadley’s: the characters, even those in relationships, feel decidedly solitary. (She has written three other works of fiction
Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love Henry Holt, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) The Birth of Love opens with a glimpse of three of the four characters whose perspectives fill the chambers of this second novel. In a single page, readers peek
(Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Dear A Visit to the Goon Squad, I was #268 on the library hold list for you after you won the National (US) Book Critics Circle Award, but before you won the Pulitzer, although my reason for wanting
Anne Peile’s Repeat It Today with Tears Serpent’s Tail, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir, The Kiss, considering the author’s four-year-long consensual relationship with her father, opens, as you might have guessed, with a kiss. “Against such backdrops, my
