Category: Identity

A lifetime of lies: Testament & Should You Ask Me

16/7/2018

Can you rewrite your own history and get away with it? That’s what Joseph Silk and Mary Holmes, lead characters in these two new novels, seem to have done. Both have been motivated to avoid traumatic memories – but there are consequences. In Joseph’s case, it’s been the impact on his family; in Mary’s, it’s a lifetime of guilt. Both novels feature a bond between young and old. Both address aspects of the Second World War: Joseph takes his suffering under Nazi-inspired racism in Hungary to his grave; far away in relatively safe Dorset, the backdrop of war pushes Mary to confess. Read my reviews and see whether you sympathise with the decisions they took.

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Late-adolescent identity in London and Dublin: The Tyranny of Lost Things & Conversations with Friends

27/6/2018

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If adolescence was the invention of the baby boomers, it’s the millennials who’ve shown – along with recent(ish) research into the developing brain – that this interlude between childhood and adulthood lingers well into one’s twenties. At this stage of our lives, many of us are still experimenting with who and how to be, as these two debut novels illustrate in thoughtful and entertaining ways. The young female narrators juggle the legacy of patchy parenting; love triangles; envy and class privilege; and platonic and sexual relationships at the boundary between intimacy and privacy – and city living, one in London and the other in Dublin. Read on!

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Two Australian novels to kick off the new #amreading year

4/1/2018

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As 2018 started a few hours earlier in Australia than in the UK, it’s fitting that I should begin my reading year there. Or it could be the coincidence of kindly publicists sending me advance copies of two Australian novels published in the UK this month. The first namechecks various Sydney suburbs, while the second begins near Melbourne before circumnavigating the country. The first contemporary, the second set in the 1950s, they explore the socio-politics of Australian identities and their links to migration and colonialism.

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Two novels about young men’s journey into Otherness

23/12/2017

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When I’m not sure what to make of a recent read, it sometimes helps if I couple it with something equally enigmatic. A common thread, even if it’s not the theme the author intended, affords me at least the illusion of understanding. So following White Tears, in which a young white man in contemporary America experiences the terror of a black man in the 1920s arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, with My Falling Down House, in which a former Tokyo “salaryman” experiences homelessness, helped me gain my bearings on both.

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Two mysteries against a backdrop of rampage and riot

11/11/2017

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These two novels are worlds apart in terms of style and genre, but both involve mysterious deaths set against real-life moments of rampage and riot in England during recent hot summers. In the first, a lone gunman on the rampage in 2010 Cumbria is integral to the story. In the second, the 2011 London riots provide the perfect backdrop for a domestic noir thriller.

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Two novels about writers and the real-life characters who get beneath their skin

2/11/2017

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Although I’ve never been sure about novels about writers, I was keen to read these two: the first about an unpublished novelist ghostwriting a memoir and the second about a poet anticipating a different kind of creativity with her first child. Both these fictional writers are brought into close contact with an unexpected other – for the first, the character whose memoir he is writing; the second, another poet who used to live in the town to which she’s recently moved – with life-changing consequences. Both novels explore the nature of the self and the permeability of the boundary with the other (and, incidentally, feature graphic scenes of childbirth). For another novel about a writer, see my review of My Name Is Lucy Barton.

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A necessary nip of narcissism?

26/3/2017

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It had been a great night at the Polari salon in Nottingham, and the audience was waiting for the final performer to take the stage, when a woman bounded from the back of the room. Scowl framed by the hood of her black anorak, and ignoring the compere’s insistence that she wasn’t on the programme, Barbara Brownskirt barked out a series of poems from her numerous unpublished collections about, among other things, her unrequited love for Judi Dench. She was scary. She was hilarious. She was – and still is – the unsuccessful lesbian Poet-in-Residence at the 197 bus stop, Penge, and the brilliant creation of writer and performer Karen McLeod.

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The Possessions by Sara Flannery Murphy

14/3/2017

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Thirty-year-old Edie works for the Elysian Society, serving as a conduit between the bereaved and their late loved ones. It’s not a job for those with big egos; after tuning in to the deceased via eliciting a memory and perusing some of their belongings, she takes a tablet which kills her consciousness while the client communes with the departed in privacy. Overseen by the imposing Mrs Renard who, despite her neat office, functions like the madam in a brothel, her colleagues provide a similar service in other rooms in the building, but none of them have stuck at it as long as Edie’s five years.

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Twin studies: Mischling by Affinity Konar

16/2/2017

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When the cattle car stops at Auschwitz, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski’s mother realises their best chance of survival is in Josef Mengele’s Zoo. As the other kids point out, to the twins shivering on their bunk that night alongside a girl on the brink of death, they get more food there (although “it’s not kosher and it eats your insides”) and keep their hair “until the lice come” and their clothes. Submitting their bodies to the doctor’s measurements and experiments, they hope the bond between them will save their humanity. But when, not long before the camp is liberated, Pearl disappears, Stasha embarks on a perilous journey through Poland’s devastation in search, not only of her sister, but of the man who has done them both such harm.

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Curiosities: Orphans of the Carnival & The Museum of Cathy

2/2/2017

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Blogger and memoirist, Irene Waters, has been collecting memories of ordinary activities across the generations and across the world. Last October’s theme, collections, sparked some interesting reminiscences about stamps, birds’ eggs and the dysfunctional parts of ballpoint pens, to name but a few. The latter came to mind when I was reading about Cathy, the protagonist of the second novel reviewed in this post, and I’ve linked her with Julia, whose unusual life, and posthumous career, is the subject of Orphans of the Carnival, who was less a collector than an object of curiosity herself. I hope you’ll be curious enough to read on.

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A great #amreading start to 2017: The Golden Legend & Homegoing

5/1/2017

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My first two reads of 2017 are linked by one of last year’s favourites: like The Underground Railroad, The Golden Legend is about outsiders on the run, while Homegoing explores the before, after and meanwhile of the slave trade between Africa and America. Both novels also reference the role of literature in challenging partial accounts of the lives of the powerless.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

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Guapa & Shylock Is My Name

22/12/2016

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This post, my last before Christmas, features two novels about men with marginalised identities. Read on and see if either takes your fancy for your holiday reading.

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150 years of Chinese-Americans: The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

6/12/2016

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When I was growing up, it was said that every fourth child was Chinese. As the fourth child of a white working-class Catholic family, I saw no contradiction in applying that logic to myself. I don’t remember how and when I was disabused of this notion, but I imagine being disappointed. Although probably too young to have a concept of Chinese identity (I think it was prior to my family frequenting Chinese restaurants), the idea of being different made perfect sense. Perhaps that’s what attracts me to reading and writing about diversity, but the Chinese are still relatively unrepresented in my fictional world (Everything I Never Told You an exceptional exception). So, having enjoyed his debut, The Welsh Girl, I looked forward to having my horizons widened by Peter Ho Davies’ new novel about Chinese-American identity, courtesy of Sceptre Books.

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Fictional celebrities: a painter, a boxer and a musician

18/8/2016

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These three novels featuring three fictional celebrities take us from the leader of an anti-establishment artists’ movement in 1930s Australia, to an Arab-Berber boxer in colonial Algeria and to a Nigerian musician and political activist in late 20th-century Kenya. Each illustrates the intertwining of social and psychological issues, and the costs and compromises of fame.

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My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

12/8/2016

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What would have to happen to drive an entire town insane? In Tiffany McDaniel’s unusual and gripping debut, all it takes for Breathed, Ohio, in the summer of 1984, is a heatwave and the suggestion that a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy is the incarnation of the devil.

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Our Panoptic World: I Am No One by Patrick Flanery

5/8/2016

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What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those of us living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground, for the satellites we have launched into space and the aircraft, manned and unmanned, patrolling the air above the Earth, gaze down upon us, producing finely detailed images of all our lives, watching us, perhaps you could say we are merely watching ourselves …

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Stitching disturbance: Belonging by Umi Sinha

19/6/2016

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Crouching on a high shelf beside the fanlight above the dining room doors, twelve-year-old Lila watches her parents and their guests sit down to a celebratory dinner. Her mother has embroidered the tablecloth in honour of her father’s fiftieth birthday, but the intricate design is obscured by the plates, placemats and silver platters. When these are finally removed, Lila still can’t get a clear sight of her mother’s handiwork, but she takes in the anger and disgust of the guests as they flee the room. Curious, she follows her father to his study where, before the adults usher her away, she sees the blood-strewn walls and smells the cordite.

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In Her Wake by Amanda Jennings & Pleasantville by Attica Locke

7/4/2016

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Today’s focus is on plot, with reviews of a psychological thriller about identity and a sophisticated crime novel against a backdrop of African-American politics.