While reading Gint Aras’s novel The Fugue the image that came to my mind was not of an eternal golden braid, but of a broken mirror, cracked and fragmented, each tiny slither reflecting a different aspect of a multifaceted narrative. It’s an image of stasis, of everything at once, eternally present, blindingly coeval. And… Read More The Fugue – Book Review
Themes of identity and belonging disturb the calm surface of Wendy Brandmark’s collection of short stories, which are set in Denver, New York and Boston in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Many of the stories concern characters who have been displaced geographically and emotionally: young or old, successful or unsuccessful, their lives have slipped… Read More He Runs the Moon – Book Review
Painting Blue Water by Leigh Fossan Katherine Ross, a struggling artist-turned-successful-businesswoman, has a life many would envy. At only thirty-one years old, Katherine runs one of the top luxury real-estate firms in Manhattan, and she lives in a fabulous loft with her dreamy husband.
Recently, I mentioned to an author that writing can sometimes seem a trivial and frivolous occupation. She replied that she never thought of it that way. It made me wonder if insecurity about writing is more of a male problem than a female one. Rather like male film actors who indulge in ‘manly’ excesses… Read More Raking the Dust – Book Review
Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow is one of many intertwined and mutually reinforcing themes in Mark Gordon’s complex and absorbing novel. The Shadow comprises the negative, primitive and morally reprehensible emotions and impulses inaccessible to the conscious mind: among them, lust, greed, envy, rage and the pursuit of power. It is at its… Read More The Snail’s Castle – Book Review
Fred Pooley has returned to London after six years in Hong Kong. He has worked hard and saved a little money, but something is wrong. He can’t settle down, he avoids visiting his mother, and there’s an emptiness inside him. Petra, a new girlfriend, tries hard to bring Fred out of himself, yet he… Read More Mister Spoonface – Book Review
I’ve always believed that a book’s power lies in its ability to make it’s readers feel. As someone who’s been both an avid book reader and an extremely emotional person all my life, feeling for the stories I’ve read has never been a problem for me. Its probably why I spent my first 10… Read More Call Me By Your Name – Book Review
‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what you’re seeing,’ Megan Kimsey remarks as she prepares to fly from Denver to Bogota at the beginning of Ginger Bensman’s ambitious novel. It’s an appropriate statement from a young woman prone not only to premonitions, but also to visions of a past life lived centuries ago in a… Read More To Swim Beneath the Earth – Book Review
In After The Fire by Will Hill, the story of how a cult community reaches a devastating crisis unfolds through the disjointed memories of one of its survivors, Moonbeam.
After reading Proud Patrick, I took it into my head to visit Michael O’Reilly’s profile on Goodreads, where I learned that he counts among his main influences, not only writers such as Forster, Hardy, Joyce, Melville, and Shakespeare, but also filmmakers such as Bergman, Cassavetes, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Lean.
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