Tag: contemporary fiction

The Course of Love (2016): Alain de Botton

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★★★★

Rahib and Kirsten meet in Edinburgh: they go on a few dates, sleep together, meet each other’s parents and enjoy the dizzying wonder of opening their soul to another human being. Rahib proposes; Kirsten accepts; they marry. And that’s where most fictions end: with wedding bells and the start of a new life together, implicitly full of happiness. But Alain De Botton’s thoughtful, wise novel asks a searching question. What if love is not the breathless romantic longing that brings about a marriage, but the hard graft that succeeds it? What if that story, of struggle, compromise, arguments, reconciliation, loneliness, determination and occasional fury was the one really worth reading?

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The Language of Dying (2009): Sarah Pinborough

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★★★★

This short novel is a curious beast. Its author is better known for her horror fiction and yet this is a story fully grounded in real life: in one of those two life-events we all share. Its narrator is a young woman who cares for her dying father in his last fight against cancer and, with stark honesty, lays out the pain and very earthly horror of the final days. It isn’t an easy read, but its power is astonishing.

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The Incarnations (2014): Susan Barker

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★★★★

This is a slightly retrospective post, as I read The Incarnations shortly before I went to China in September. I’d never heard of the book before, but I spotted it one day in the library and was intrigued by its elaborate cover. While I’m not usually all that keen on the ‘past lives’ school of historical fiction, this tale of reincarnation and rivalry echoing down the centuries proved to be very engaging. Unfolding among the grey blocks and smoggy air of 21st-century Beijing, it also offers a fictional primer to the last two thousand years of Chinese history, as one very ordinary man finds himself dogged by an insistent – and intrusive – ghost from his own past.

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Grotesque (2003): Natsuo Kirino

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★★★★

I’ve been meaning to read more Japanese fiction, but nothing quite prepared me for Natsuo Kirino’s twisted tale of female bitterness. It has made a great impact. Brutal and crude, it’s told in a detached manner that verges on the soulless. It’s also a sobering story of three young women fighting for empowerment and recognition in a world where the only accepted currency is beauty. The tale is grotesque; the setting is bleak; there isn’t a single sympathetic character in the whole damn book and yet, despite all of this, Kirino manages to create something completely gripping.

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Cousins (2016): Salley Vickers

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★★★★

Despite having read only three of Salley Vickers’s earlier books, I’ve always had a soft spot for her work. I read Miss Garnet’s Angel at an impressionable age when I adored anything about Venice (as I still do), was intrigued by the romantic tension of Instances of the Number 3 (my edition had Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St Anne on the cover: a surefire hit) and remember devouring Mr Golightly’s Holiday one Christmas beside a roaring fire. Her books always seem to have come to me at the right moment, veiled with a certain sense of enigma and spiritual mystery that has always appealed. Her new novel Cousins is cut from rather different cloth, stripping away the gentle religious undertones of these earlier novels and replacing them with a sensitive, probing exposé of a family’s secrets, unmasked in the aftermath of a terrible accident.

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The People in the Trees (2013): Hanya Yanagihara

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★★★★½

As you probably remember, I was deeply moved by Yanagihara’s recent novel A Little Life, and was keen to read her first book, The People in the Trees. This received equally rave reviews when it came out in 2013 and at first glance suggests a tale of old-fashioned adventure, lost worlds and hacking through jungles. It focuses on an immunologist who, while on a field trip to a remote Micronesian island, makes a thrilling discovery. Evidence suggests that the members of a primitive, forgotten tribe may have found the Holy Grail of medical science: the key to eternal life.

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The Museum of Things Left Behind (2015): Seni Glaister

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★★★★

Somewhere on the border between Italy and Austria, in a deep gorge shielded from its neighbours’ eyes, lies the pretty little city-state of Vallerosa. Life in this sleepy country continues much as it has for decades: every evening the men gather at the two bars in the main square – the clientele of each dictated by long tradition; the women work hard out of sight; and Vallerosa’s chief glory remains the plantations where they grow their famous tea. And yet the President, Sergio Scorpioni, is troubled.

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A Little Life (2015): Hanya Yanagihara

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★★★★½

This is going to be hard to write about, and not because I don’t know what to say, but because I don’t know how to say it. I want to use words that I customarily turn to when speaking of things I admire: brilliant, magnificent, splendid, astonishing. But such words neuter the power of this book and render it somehow superficial and glittery, when what I actually want to convey is that this novel one moment twists your stomach and ties knots in your throat, and the next offers you a moment of beauty as perfect and transitory as sunlight reflecting off a lacquered bowl. I’m not sure I can express how good this book is without trivialising it. If I say that, on finishing it, I sat in the shadows and actually wept with rage and the poignant shame of it, that might give you some idea of its impact.

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Room (2010): Emma Donoghue

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★★★★

I’ve avoided reading Room for a long time. Although I enjoyed Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music and Slammerkin, there was something about the subject matter of Room that made, and still makes, me very uneasy. Some people like to explore uncomfortable themes in fiction, but I’m not one of them. On the other hand I don’t want to create some fluffy, pastel-coloured world for myself in which nothing bad ever happens. With the release of the critically acclaimed film last year (which I also haven’t seen), it became more and more imperative that I should read Room. And, in the end, it was both more endearing and more heartbreaking than I expected. It’s a difficult book to review, so bear with me.

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The Girl on the Train (2015): Paula Hawkins

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★★★★

Oh boy. This is that rare thing: a bestseller that actually does live up to its reputation. Whatever you do, don’t start reading it if you have anything to do in the near future. As a contemporary thriller, it’s not the kind of book I’d normally read – but there’s been so much talk about it recently and, with news of a film adaptation in the works, I thought I’d better read it before it can be spoiled for me. I never got round to reading Gone Girl, for example, and now that’s been so widely discussed that there seems little point in starting on it. But The Girl on the Train was all that I expected it to be and more, because I bought it without any real idea of what it was. It’s the kind of book you read with your heart in your mouth and the world around you strangely muted as if you’re submerged beneath the water.

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