At Night All Blood is Black is a short yet certainly not breezy read. David Diop’s novel reads very much like the increasingly feverish confession of a man whose every-day reality is permeated by violence. He is both victim and perpetrator, cognisant of the violence that dominates his life yet somehow unwilling to truly consider […]
MoreThis is the third novella I’ve read by P. Djèlí Clark and once again I find myself loving his building but not his story or characters. This novella is set in an alternate 1912 Cairo where djinns and angels are the norm. world happens to be the home to djinns Egypt, . In an alternate […]
More“We all lived in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all all nations into one great suffer body.” This is the third novel I’ve read by Emma Donoghue and […]
More“Do you know that no character is any good in this world unless that will has been broken completely? Broken and re-set in God’s own way. I don’t think your will has been quite broken, my dear child, do you?” After converting to Catholicism, nine year old Nanda Gray is sent by her father to […]
More“No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammelled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from […]
MoreStep aside, Becky Sharp. Move over, Scarlett O’Hara…make way for Undine Spragg, the most unscrupulous anti-heroine I have ever encountered. “[S]he could not conceive that any one could tire of her of whom she had not first tired.” Wharton once again focuses her narrative on a young woman’s unrelenting attempts at social climbing. While Wharton […]
More“Reason and rationality reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery. There was no room, it turned out, for little girls who wandered off the edge of the map and told the truth about the mad, impossible things they found there.” Readers who have yet to dip their toes in the vast […]
MoreAlthough short Summer is an interesting read. Feelings and actions are obliquely revealed or hinted at, so much so that many of the decisive events that our ‘heroine’ Charity experiences are only alluded to or described in an indirect fashion. Because of this, the changing dynamics between the various characters can at times be hard […]
MoreInitially I found the seemingly unassuming prose of Stoner to be full of insight. The very first page coldly announces the eponymous protagonist’s death, and I was drawn in by the unromantic story.The novel focuses on William Stoner’s life: his rather miserable marriage to Edith as well as his studies and his academic career. Urged […]
MoreA challenging and emotional novel that is both engrossing and difficult to read. Boyne offers us a tale of war, love, jealousy, and the way in which one’s principles can dictate one’s life. It is a gut-wrenching story and it was impossible not to feel affected by what Tristan – our main character – experiences […]
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