Samantha Hunt’s The Seas (2004) Picador, 2006 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Samantha Hunt’s debut begins: “The highway only goes south from here.” You might think that this will be a linear tale. But no, by the end of the first four pages,
Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud Sceptre - Hodder & Stoughton, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) At first the cover might seem gimmicky, but now, having read Emma Henderson’s first novel, I realize that it’s the perfect way to summarize the
Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Readers fall hard into Louise Doughty’s sixth novel. The emotional intensity in Whatever You Love is pervasive: even when the root of that intensity is character rather than
Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Harper Collins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Countless contemporary novels have taken the landscape of the monogamous marriage and its secrets as their subject, so it’s hardly surprising that a polygamous marriage, like
Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Loving an excerpt as much as I loved “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” brings a sense of trepidation alongside excitement when approaching the longer work. Would Swamplandia! leave me with the same pressing desire
