Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry … It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life”,… Continue reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Category: Fiction
Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry
Purchase a copy for yourself here! On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a string of nine unidentified flying objects in the Mount Rainier area, a story that would spark national news coverage and mark the first modern UFO sighting post-WWII. The story catalyzed an international obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrial life,… Continue reading Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry
Lot by Bryan Washington
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete”, writes Bryan Washington in his award-winning story collection, Lot, an exploration of one of America’s most fascinating metropolises and the characters that inhabit it. Around half of the stories in the collection are told from the perspective of Nicolás,… Continue reading Lot by Bryan Washington
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Purchase a copy for yourself here! With his recent debut, Real Life, Brandon Taylor has reinvigorated the concept of the campus novel. The novel’s protagonist is Wallace, a grad student biochemistry researcher at a midwestern university, one which has not admitted a black student into its lab in over three decades. Wallace, a gay black… Continue reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In her 2003 memoir, Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton recalls the moment that Bill Clinton proposed marriage to her: “I knew that when I decided to marry, I wanted it to be for life. … I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I’d be… Continue reading Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Britt Bennett’s recent novel, The Vanishing Half, deals in multiplicative identities. The Vanishing Half is Bennett’s follow up to her debut novel, The Mothers (Read my review here), which similarly dwells on how explosive secrets can tear families and communities asunder. The novel begins with sixteen-year old twins, Desiree… Continue reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Purchase a copy for yourself here! A Burning begins not only with a burning—a train car lit on fire in a terrorist attack that kills 100 patrons—but with a Facebook post. Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in the Kolabagan slum in Bangladesh, witnessed the terrorist attack and expresses her outrage on social media, posting… Continue reading A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Before she was the literary cool-girl icon that she is now, Sally Rooney burst onto the scene with her 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s much-awaited second novel, Normal People (check out my review here), only cemented her position as the preeminent trendy millennial novelist. The highly successful… Continue reading Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy here! Britt Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers begins, “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”… Continue reading The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In an interview at the University of Central Florida, novelist Emily St. John Mandel said, “You can make an argument that the world’s become more bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the end of the world”. Her most recent novel, The Glass Hotel, published… Continue reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel