The latest addition to my website is Robert Irwin‘s The Runes Have Been Cast. This is a very funny spoof campus novel/spoof ghost story, set in the early 1960s. Two Oxford University English lit students have been asked to write on the Victorian ghost story, and this gives us a lead-in to many references to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Twenty-Twenty. This is a diary, influenced by Uwe Johnson‘s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), which he reads and comments on, in the early part of the book. We follow the author – he simply calls himself Ellis – both in his daily activities – shopping,looking after his young daughter, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sarah Hall‘s Burntcoat. Our heroine is Edith Harknesss. We follow her life from when she was ten and her mother, a successful novelist, had an aneurysm but survived though much changed. Edith decides to become an artist, focussing on monumental works using shou sugi ban, a Japanese charred … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Barker‘s The Women of Troy. This follows on from Barker’s previous novel, The Silence of the Girls, where we followed the story of Briseis, a captured royal who became Achilles’ trophy. At the beginning of this novel, Achilles, rightly fearing his impending death, marries her off to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michel Butor‘s L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time). I had already read and reviewed this novel (link is to the old review) but a new edition of the English translation has just appeared from Pariah Press so I have read that. (I read it in French for the previous … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Neglected Writer. The eponymous neglected writer may well refer to Sharp himself, a British experimental writer who is still relatively unknown. However, it probably refers to Eliot Blount, the narrator of this novel. Blount is an Englishman in Hollywood in 1932. He receives an anonymous phone … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Klara and the Sun. The novel is set in the not too distant further in the United States and tells the story of Klara, an AF, i.e. an artificial friend, a robot that acts as a friend to a child, not least because children do not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Coe‘s Mr Wilder and Me. This is a funny and serious story about a young woman who accidentally gets involved in the making of Billy Wilder‘s second-to-last film Fedora, leading her to a career in composing film music. We follow in some detail the making of he … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alex Pheby‘s Mordew. This is a very original dark fantasy novel, part Dickens, part Peake, all Pheby. While it has some of the usual themes – good versus evil, rich versus poor, betrayal and dirty deeds – Pheby is a thoroughly original writer, telling his story well, both … Read more
The latest addition to my website is David Mitchell‘s Utopia Avenue. The story starts in January 1967 in London and tells how a group is formed by a Canadian manager of four different characters, three men and one woman and the various trials and tribulations they face including but not limited to sex, drugs, family … Read more