Lucy Barton is a wonderful discovery, Elizabeth Strout even a greater one.By writing Lucy’s character Strout wrote and made a whole world, a world in its complexity and its entirety. Lucy is an unforgettable character, so unique, so different, so lifelike, so herself. She is different than other people around her, she is careful, timid, …
Tag Archives: booker prize shortlist
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
Sometimes you strongly dislike a book from the very first page, reading on because of stubbornness or the belief that an International Booker prize winner has to have something more than meets the eye. So, I read on. The plot is this: after the mutilation of Mademba in World War I, Alfa, our narrator, is …
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Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Real Life is an emotional, delicate story about real, ordinary life, about what real life makes of us, how life changes and influences people throughout their lives, how it makes them come to conclusions about life itself. It is a story about abuse, rape, cruelty, inequality, racism, (abusive) relationships, insecurities, religious fanaticism and primitivism, the …
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
This Mournable Body is a powerful, gut-wrenching novel, a novel that leaves you with a feeling of uneasiness, a feeling of nausea, a queasiness deep inside. It is a novel about a lost woman, a woman torn between her family legacy and history, her own past, the past of her country, her own expectations and …
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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Is it at all possible to say that real life is too tragic? That anything in real life can be too tragic? That there can be too much tragedy? Not at all, because life is too often too tragic. However, fiction can be too tragic because fiction (although it can be based on real life …
10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
This is not only a story about a hard life of a prostitute, her life and death pains, paired with a gallery of unique and original characters, but a story about life, death, abuse, secrets and lies, life in a repressive society, the fight for freedom, the fight for the right to be different, told …
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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
And thirty five years later, we know how it ended. Or do we? We know how Gilead ended but we are missing what we (or at least I) have been expecting. What exactly happened to June, immediately after the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale. That seems to be the general feeling I had reading this …
A Literary Snob 