Tag: contemporary fiction
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Book Review – May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett
When Shauna leaves Dublin City for the suburbs with her mother, Dean enters her life as part of a soon-to-be-inseparable foursome of friends navigating the trials and tribulations of adolescence. The spark of friendship quickly blossoms towards something more for Shauna and Dean but, with their own struggles and ties pulling them separate ways, they…
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Book Review – Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
14-year-old Cora Mowat is growing up in 1990s Fife, on a council estate in post-industrial Scotland, and life is not easy. It’s just her, her mum who’s in a wheelchair, and her mum’s boyfriends who pass through over the years. Money is scarce, school is a challenge, friendships can be tricky, and things would definitely…
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Book Review – Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Isla, Irene and Agnes. Three sisters with a fractured relationship and tetchy dynamic, drawn back together after their father’s death. Navigating a city of perpetual rain, where the dead can’t be buried or they will actually rise again, the sisters move through, and exist in, this sodden landscape; a place where the daily produce many…
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Book Review – Wild Ground by Emily Usher
When we meet Jennifer, she’s working in a London cafe, working hard to leave her past behind her; but when her past walks back into her present, we are taken back to her childhood and adolescence, to a time and place where she was known as Neef, and Neef and Danny were inseparable, until the…
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Book Review – Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
Signal Fires is a poignant, moving and beautifully written portrait of two families living on Division Street; a suburban American street where the families live quietly side by side and where everyone still has their secrets, crossing paths only occasionally but at the most pivotal times in their lives. Ben and Mimi Wilf, and their…
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Book Review – Kala by Colin Walsh
We’re perched on our bikes at the top of the hill. There’s a turning melt of sky above us. The town’s glittering below. We’re fifteen and it’s the summer of our lives so Kinlough is gathering itself up into the moment with us – the whole town’s pure responsive to our energies. The year is…
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Book Review – One Friday in Napa by Jennifer Hamm
Deep in the Napa Valley, a story of past and present unfolds. When Vene learns that her mother Olivia is nearing death, she reluctantly returns to her family home, only to find her mother as cold and difficult as ever; but when Vene discovers an old cookbook, filled with revelatory notes, a whole new side…
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Book Review – Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson opens at the beginning of a hot summer that will change everything for our narrator, Stephen, and his friends; school is finished, capturing that moment between childhood and adulthood with all its uncertainty and potential, and the future is both frightening and exciting. By the end of this summer…
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Book Review – Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
This is our dancing time. It’s 1978, and Yamaye and her friends live in a small, industrial town on the edge of London, once a site of pagan rituals, where they dance with the dead. This town of cemeteries and ghosts is brought to life at the weekend by the dub reggae beats in an…
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Book Review – Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Your Driver is Waiting is a razor sharp and darkly comic vision of a contemporary city, viewed through our RideShare driver Damani’s eyes as she cruises through it, its inhabitants’ lives flashing before her. This unnamed city is heaving with people, simmering with an undercurrent of threat, and wracked with protests and riots. Driving long…
The Resting Willow 