Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 288 pages; 2023. Max Easton’s Paradise Estate practically pulses with modern-day life. It’s been a long time since I read a book that felt so “of the moment”. This shouldn’t be a surprise given it’s set in 2022, but its unabashed widescreen examination of the issues facing Millennials — a generation grappling with a precarious job market, unaffordable housing and soaring student debt — gives it a meaning (and a complexity) sorely lacking in so many other contemporary novels I’ve read this year. There’s so much to unpick in this multi-faceted story. It explores ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury Circus; 374 pages; 2020. Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World is a gripping account of a Palestinian woman, trapped in a small nine-metre square prison cell, who writes her life story on the “glossy gray cinder-block walls” of the “Cube”. A fast-paced narrative full of drama and intrigue, it’s deeply political, defiant and edgy, and reading it gave me a whole new perspective on recent Palestinian history. A tale of rebellion The tale is narrated in the first person by Nahr, who writes in a fierce, rebellious and tenacious voice (to match her personality ..read more

Non-fiction – hardcover; 4th Estate; 288 pages; 2023. Self-help books, even if they are about creativity (one of my pet subjects), aren’t normally my cup of tea, but when I picked up Holly Ringland’s The House That Joy Built in my local independent bookshop, attracted by its beautiful cover, I started to read the first page — and was hooked. Many of you may be familiar with the author, who is Australian and grew up in Queensland. She has two international bestselling novels to her name — The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (which has been adapted for TV) and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding — but ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 352 pages; 2023. It’s hard not to draw a comparison between Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (which sold more than two million copies worldwide in its first 10 years of release) and The Disorganisation of Celia Stone, a new novel by Perth journalist Emma Young, which feels like an updated version for a new generation and a new century. But where Bridget Jones explores life as a “singleton” bumbling her way through a chaotic love life in pursuit of a husband, Young’s protagonist, Celia Stone, is a happily married 30-somethin ..read more

Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 248 pages; 2018. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley. The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey is billed as a medieval detective story, but it’s also a deeply atmospheric exploration of a small community grappling with secrets and moral dilemmas. Set in an impoverished and isolated Somerset village in the mid-15th century, it charts the impact on the residents, and the religious leader who presides over them, when a wealthy landowner drowns. Was it an accident, was it suicide or was he murdered? If a murder, then it shows our savagery; if ..read more

A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023 Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016. Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991. It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons. Both Mary Louise ..read more

Non-fiction – Kindle edition; Hachette Books Ireland; 224 pages; 2016. When does the past become the past? Or as Irish writer John Banville so eloquently puts it: What transmutation must the present go through in order to become the past? Time’s alchemy works in a bright abyss. This fascination with the juncture between now and then is a constant refrain in Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, an intriguing book that is part memoir, part nostalgic travel guide, illustrated with photographs by Paul Joyce. Full of Banville’s trademark wit and literary flourishes, combined with historical ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 102 pages; 2019. I’m not sure what to make of Peach, the debut by Welsh writer Emma Glass, which portrays the aftermath of a teenage girl’s unreported sexual assault. Told in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness style, it uses disjointed language and repeated words and phrases to mirror the girl’s thought patterns. It is not an easy read. That’s because of the gruesome subject matter and the style Glass employs to tell the story. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what is real and what is not and whether Peach (that’s the name of our narrator) is hall ..read more

Fiction – hardcover; Faber & Faber; 43 pages; 2023. Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day is a sublime tale about a man who is not what he first appears to be. This short story was first published as a standalone text in 2022 by Keegan’s French publisher, Sabine Wespieser, under the title Misogynie (which might give you a slight inkling as to what it is about). It is set on a single summer’s day — Friday 29 July — but despite the sunshine and “a taste of cut grass” in the air, something is amiss. Lonely man Keegan paints an evocative portrait of Cathal, an office worker in Dublin, who seems ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 159 pages;  2018. Richard Ford’s Wildlife is a beguiling novella told from the perspective of a teenage boy, Joe Brinson, whose parents are going through a little “bump” in their marriage and behave in unfathomable and self-destructive ways. The opening paragraph sets the scene: In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that ..read more