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, …
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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 …
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang
Isn’t it such a shame when a book starts off wonderfully: interesting, dynamic, original, just to continue and end in a completely different tone. By the end How Much of These Hills Is Gold lost all of its novelty and freshness. It turned into unskillfully written chapters filled with incredibility and tackiness. The main thread …
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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 …
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated by Michele Hutchison Harsh, bitter, cruel, brutal. These are the words that could describe this novel the best. But, unfortunately for the world we live in, this novel feels true and genuine. How is this much hardship, so many problems and difficulties even possible in a life of a child. In a life of …
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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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An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
Advertised as the modern day Odyssey, I did not wait waste my time and I picked up this novel right away, but after reading pages and pages I could not find neither Odysseus, nor the Trojan war. It was only – mentioned in the text. There was Odysseus, there was Penelope, but not much to …
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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 …
Anna Burns, Milkman
When was the last time you looked at a sunset? And what colour was the sky? Did you feel happy nobody told you what to see and what not to look at? Maybe you should… When I opened this book and started reading it I was surprised because nothing could have prepared me for the …
A Literary Snob 