The new novel by Kate Atkinson unfolds in postwar Britain, beginning in 1949 and moving toward the summer of the Festival of Britain in 1951, using this moment of national self-reinvention as both backdrop and metaphor. At its center is Harry Flynn, a man presumed dead by many who knew him, including former colleagues, and […]
Set on the Isle of Harris during the 1990s, John of John is grounded in a vivid and striking Scottish landscape, with prose that immediately draws the reader in. By alternating between the perspectives of Cal and John, the narrative invites empathy for both men, even as they hurt one another. Although the central momentum […]
The novel begins with Matthew Phillips, a middle-aged heart surgeon in Edinburgh who is exhausted, emotionally disconnected from his family, and quietly unraveling under the pressure of his professional life. When he receives a jury citation, he deliberately does not seek exemption, even though he could easily do so because of his job. He sees […]
The book takes place over roughly one year in Paris and is narrated by a woman who closely resembles Deborah Levy herself. She has come to Paris to live alone, to write, and to work on an essay about Gertrude Stein. She rents a small studio apartment near the Seine and Notre-Dame and begins her […]
The novel opens with Jade Zhao arriving at an airport in the Central State after fifteen years abroad. The world she returns to is shaped by the aftermath of a global pandemic caused by Virus Nexus, which led to sealed borders and the collapse of Western political alliances. At the airport, passengers are separated into […]
The book opens in contemporary Britain, in the period following the death of the narrator’s mother and during her father’s slow recovery from bowel cancer. The unnamed narrator is a successful novelist and screenwriter in her late forties, living in London with her partner. She is physically exhausted, emotionally raw, and still deeply entangled in […]
PART I In 1865, mapmaker Tomas travels with his ten-year-old son Liam to a remote peninsula on the western edge of Europe. Tomas has been hired by British government soldiers—“redcoats”—to survey and revise maps of the land as part of a vast colonial mapping project. His value lies in his fluency in both English and […]
The novel is narrated by Tennyson Bouguereau, an elderly African American man looking back across a long, violent, and morally fraught life shaped by slavery, war, displacement, and love. The novel opens in West Tennessee in the 1840s, with Tennyson recounting the story of his father, Charles (Chas) Bouguereau, a free man of mixed heritage […]
Alice Winn’s Worship opens not with anticipation but with certainty. Sir Tristram knows he is about to die. He has been told so by Sir Palomides, the knight who now stands over him with a sword. Isode the Fair is with Tristram as he bleeds, frantic with grief, while Tristram, unable to speak, reflects that […]
This is a highly readable, commercial bookclub novel set in 1960s London, told in the third person, and centred on the constraints placed on women seeking purpose, autonomy and creative fulfilment. It combines a feel-good historical tone with a bookish premise and the contemporary appetite for spicy fiction. Mitzy Barlow is an average housewife, married […]