If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
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 the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Charles Dickens' Bleak House and John Ajvide Lindqvist's Harbor (Translated by Marlaine Delargy) are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack,
The widow has let her hair go. It is half mahogany and half dull grey. Not only grey, but dull grey. Paola and Renata's listening that summer One has the sense that being a widow might have brought this about. The simple act of inhabiting widowhood. But that
To begin with, young Laura is rushed into packing her things into plastic bags. Just a few pages later, Sylvie is thrust into "double-time walking" with her mom. Either of these girls could be the "in-motion" girl on the cover of Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough. But they are only two
