Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

 What We Thought of It:

Transcendent Kingdom is the second novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi.

As a child, Gifty searched for answers in the absolutism of her evangelical faith. Yet “when I lost my brother […] God was gone in an instant.”

Now she struggles to balance three things – the evangelical faith she has rejected but cannot wholly let go. Her family’s struggles with addiction and depression. And the neuroscience research she has immersed herself in to try and make sense of it all.

“I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing I would never fully know.”

Her brother, a brilliant athlete, died of a heroin addiction that began when he was prescribed opiates for a sports injury. Her mother has since suffered cycles of depression that leave her unable to get out of bed. As Gifty sees it, in both cases, there are issues with reward seeking: in depression, there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure; drug addiction, there is not enough.

The mice she experiments on are addicted to the energy drink, Ensure. They will endure repeated electric shocks in the desperate home of getting another dose. Gifty is looking for ways to turn that reward seeking behaviour. At the back of her mind, there is always the question:

“Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?”

Gifty’s family emigrated from Ghana to America when she was a small child. The racism they have since experienced undoubtedly plays a part in the scars the family all carry. Their father, who is eventually driven back to Ghana by homesickness, learns early on, “how America changed around big black men.” How he had to “try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through Walmart, where he was accused to stealing three times in four months.” Nana endures racist abuse from the parents of other team members when he is playing sport. And Gifty overhears members of her church, which has been her sanctuary, remark how “their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs.”

But this is not primarily a story of the harm caused by racism – personal or institutional. It is about a quest to understand what makes us human. What gives us the spark of life and what causes us, sometimes, to throw that gift away. As we follow Gifty along both paths, Gyasi seems to say that science and religion both have insights to offer – and both have limitations.

As she explains in her Acknowledgements, Gyasi has drawn on the research work of a close friend to provide the details of Gifty’s research. The depth of her understanding allows the science behind Gifty’s research to be woven into the fabric of the story – not simply overlaid on it. The clinical detail plays against the lyrical prose, just as, in the themes of the book, science plays against religion, and Amereica’s culture and tradition plays against Ghana’s. Gyasi holds the tension between them to the end, not allowing either one nor the other to win.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Technologies of the Self by Haris A Durrani, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon

Avoid If You Dislike: Descriptions of experiments on animals.

Perfect Accompaniment: Chin chin (Ghanaian fried spiced pastry crisps)

Genre: Contemporary, Literary

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The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Reviewer: David C. Dawson

What we thought:

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”

This is a book that divided the critics. Well, it polarised them actually. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012 and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel in 2013. But it also had some pretty nasty tongue-lashings from the critics on The New York Times and The Guardian among others.

Well I loved it.

It’s a tragic love story. Miller retells Homer’s heroic story of Achilles in the Trojan Wars from the point of view of his companion Patroclus. The exact nature of the two men’s relationship has been debated through the centuries. In Miller’s novel you are left with no doubt. They were lovers from their teens. The relationship is passionate, strong and long lasting. At least, it lasts until Patroclus is killed in battle (no spoiler alert if you've read your ancient Greek!). The death of Patroclus leaves Miller with a problem, given the novel is narrated by him. Unabashed, she continues his narration from beyond the grave. Surprisingly, it works.

This is such a beautiful book to read. Miller has a wonderfully contemporary style, which sits well in the ancient setting. Critics have attacked the book’s accessibility, accusing it of being “a good beach read in the style of Dawson’s Creek”. A reference not lost on me with my surname! I disagree strongly with this disparaging criticism. I enjoyed Miller’s writing style and the way she gave life to her characters. This is in no way a dry historical novel. It’s rich in emotion and action and ultimately very moving.

A very accessible read that will help many people get into the ancient Greek myths and legends.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Open Arms of the Sea by Jasper Dorgan

Avoid If You Dislike: Some description of gay sex, some bloody battle description

Perfect Accompaniment: An ouzo and olives

Genre: LGBTQI, Historical, Romance



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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It

Yet another spellbinding book of which I first heard an extract at the Asian Writers Festival 2018.

Deepa Anappara is a journalist who spent a long time investigating cases of children going missing in the bastis (or slums) of Indian cities – where (as Anappara notes in her Afterward) as many as 180 children are said to go missing every day. But within the restrictions of news articles, she could never find a way of conveying the “resilience, cheerfulness and swagger” of the children she encountered during her investigations.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is her attempt to put that record straight. When their friends from school start to go missing, and the police seem wholly uninterested in helping the distressed families, nine-year-old Jai and his friends Pari and Faiz decide to take matters into their own hands and conduct their own investigation. Jai is an avid watcher of police dramas on television and is sure that he knows exactly what needs to be done. But will their zeal just bring them into danger themselves?

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line takes horrifying statistics of missing children and personalises them, reminding us that, for each and every one, there is a family grieving.

“Inside that house sadness sticks to me like a shirt damp with sweat on a hot summer’s day.”

The child viewpoint here is wonderfully drawn and Anappara has indeed captured the irrepressible cheekiness of her protagonists. But don’t be fooled. This is not the Famous Five transported to a unnamed Indian city, and the evil that lurks in the basti is no comic book villain who could have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids. The journalist in Anappara knows the truth is far darker than that.

As the story unfolds, it takes in the vast gulfs of inequality in modern Indian society, the fragility of life in the basti, and how suspicion leads only too easily to sectarian mistrust and, ultimately, violence.

A heart-breaking story that nonetheless captures the joyous resilience of children living on the brink.

Longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021

You Will Enjoy This If You Loved: The Baby Ganesh Agency series by Vaseem Khan, Freedom by Catherine Johnson, Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories of missing children; child narrators

Perfect Accompaniment: Dahl and roti

Genre: Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction

Buy This Book Here

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones was a worthy winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The novel is the story of a miscarriage of justice. Not the sort that makes headlines, but the banal sort that leads to a man walking out the back door of a prison with his belongings in a bag after serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. It was written in protest against wrongful imprisonment and mass incarceration, endemic among Black men in the US. (One quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in US jails, and Black men are incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white men.)

Ray and Celestial have been married barely a year when they find themselves staying in a motel near his parents’ home in Alabama. They have a foolish quarrel, he goes out to get ice from the dispenser – and a chance encounter with an elderly white woman leads to him being wrongfully accused of rape.

This is Alabama, and even though Celestial can testify to his spending the night beside her in bed, Ray is convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison.

The middle section of the novel is told through the letters Ray and Celestial exchange while he is in prison. Neither she nor anyone in their families doubts his innocence, but the strain placed upon their young marriage is almost unbearably painful to read, as they drift further and further apart in their experience of life. Jones barely hints at the brutal realities of life behind bars – Ray is trying to shield Celestial from all that – but the little we glimpse is horrific enough.

The final section of the novel charts what happens when, after five years, Ray’s conviction is overturned and he is released from prison. As to the final outcome, you will have to read it for yourself. But Jones turns a magnifying glass on what imprisonment does to men and to their families.

As Jones said in her acceptance speech for the 2019 Women’s Prize: “Keep in your hearts and have empathy for the millions of people who are incarcerated around the world ... Hold your governments accountable for those who are held in bondage in our names.”

(Lest those of us in the UK should get too smug – a reminder that we have the highest rate of incarceration of any country in Europe – and one of the highest rates of recidivism.)

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Secret Letters from A to X by Nasrin Parvaz, Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Avoid If You Dislike: Looking at the human cost of at a justice system in crisis

Perfect Accompaniment: A perfectly ripe pear

Genre: Literary Fiction

Buy a copy here.

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Ayoola summons me with these words – Koreda, I killed him. I had hoped I would never here these words again.

There are so many amazing authors, Nigerian or of Nigerian heritage, who today are providing an antidote to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called ‘the dangers of the single story.’ Leye Adenle, Olumide Popoola, Chinelo Okparanta and Tomi Adeyemi, to name but a few, are creating stories that paint a far more nuanced picture of Nigeria than we in the West usually see, or drawing on traditional culture – be it Yoruba, Edo, Hausa – to create entirely new kinds of fantasy worlds.

The latest of these, for me, is Oyinkan Braithwaite. My Sister the Serial Killer is a fantastically original crime thriller. Like Leye Adenla’s Easy Motion Tourist it is set in Lagos, but in tone, style and setting, the two could hardly be more different.

This is the story of two sisters, Koreda and Ayoola, tied to one another by a secret that just keeps on getting darker. Ayoola is a fashion designer, spoilt and beautiful, the kind of person everyone falls in love with. Koreda is older, a senior nurse in a Lagos hospital, forever in her sister’s shadow.

There are shades here of Dexter (from the television series of that name or the crime series by Jeff Lindsay) – but Ayoola is no Dexter. She is chaotic, unpredictable and a nightmare for her sister. Koreda is the one who must think ahead. Spot dangers. And clean up after her sister.

The chapters here are very short – almost as if they were journal entries, or brief glimpses into Koreda’s mind, as Ayoola rocks her world again and again. There are flashbacks to a brutal upbringing with a tyrannical, abusive father, revealing the roots of a loyalty that goes deeper than self-preservation.

A darkly hilarious crime thriller, shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for literature and longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenla, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Avoid If You Dislike: Amoral Crime Thrillers.

Perfect Accompaniment: Pineapple upside down cake.

Genre: Crime

Available on Amazon

Circe by Madeline Miller

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch out attention.
Like many children in the Anglosphere, I grew up on retellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In them, as a rule, heroes are allowed but one fatal flaw. And gods are either cardboard cut-outs or petulant humans with super-powers. Madeline Miller’s gift is to flesh out those stereotypes of myth and legend and give them fully formed lives of their own.

Seven years ago, when I reviewed Miller's The Song of Achilles, I ended by looking forward to her promised retelling of the Odyssey, with Odysseus – one of The Song’s most intriguing characters – as its central character. What Miller has delivered instead is a tale told by Circe, the nymph – or witch – who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. In doing so, she reveals Odysseus in a fresh perspective – both hero and, in his own way, monster.

But Circe’s story stretches back long before her meeting with Odysseus and survives well after his death. Miller picks up the multiple threads of her life from different myths and weaves them into a rich and complex tapestry. What is it life to be born the daughter of a Titan – a lesser god, immortal yet all but powerless, subject to the whims of Titans and Olympians alike? What does it mean that she becomes a witch? And how, and why?

And what of those whose lives intertwine with hers? Prometheus. Scylla. Pasiphae. Daedalus. Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope. Miller delivers them all as fully realised, complex characters.

Miller succeeds in finding a balance between Circe as someone we can relate to, but also someone who is not merely human. You can look at Circe as someone who survives an abusive childhood, sexual assault and abandonment. Who is deeply wounded and draws on her own resources to heal herself.

“All my life had been murk and depth, but I was not part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.”

Yet we are never allowed to forget that her immortality gives her both powers and limitations .

“Guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.”

An even greater achievement than The Song of Achilles, the breadth and scope of Miller’s imaginings here are breathtaking.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Literature

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. The Bees by Laila Paul

Avoid If You Dislike: Myths given depth and form

Perfect Accompaniment: Olives, cheese and wine

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon

Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Sometimes in the lives of ordinary people, there is a great halt, a revelation, a moment of change. It occurs under low metal skies, never when one is happy.

Diana Evans' Ordinary People is the slow meandering study of the dissolution of two marriages.

It’s been done before, of course. But these four people are not the usual white suburbanites of such tales. They are Black Londoners. And that changes the texture of the story and the nature of the strains upon their marriage. Michael and Melissa, Damian and Stephanie come from the kind of backgrounds that Afua Hirsch writes about in Brit(ish) or Akala in Natives. Melissa’s mother is a Nigerian women, who still carries with her elements of her traditional beliefs. Damian’s father is a Jamaican man who was often too wrapped up in the struggle against racism to remember to be a father ...

The story opens with the election of Obama and is rocked by the death of Michael Jackson. Over and above the usual strains on married life - money, work, bringing up children - lie  whole other set of pressures. When a young black kid is stabbed on Michael and Melissa’s patch, there is a tension between Melissa’s visceral need to get away from London’s knife crime and the threat it poses to her children, and Michael’s need to live among people who look like him.

Yet this is very much London. Michael and Melissa live on the edge of Crystal Park, and the slow disintegration of the once magnificent Great Exhibition becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of their marriage – even as it reminds us of the role of Empire in bringing Black people to live in Britain. (“We are here because you were there,” as Stuart Hall once said.) It manifests itself in a kind of haunting of their house, where they both feel increasingly out of place.

Evans’ situation may be domestic, but her language is lyrical: “Long clouds lay out, some moving and pink and slipping away, and at one end, in the south, the mood slid full, round and golden into a case of silver wisps, until it was swallowed, whole.”

The style of the writing is close and intimate – and yet at the same time, slightly detached, as if we were a roving camera following the four characters around, without ever quite slipping inside them.

“His love for her was still deep and wide, it shattered him, it was destroying him.”

In the end, the pathos of the story lies in the fact that love on its own is not always enough to sustain a marriage.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Literature

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Celeste Ng, Carole Shields, Anne Tyler

Avoid If You Dislike: Intimate inspections of a marriage

Perfect Accompaniment: Barbecued pork belly and rather too much beer

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon

The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

The Trick to Time is a tender exploration of love and loss and the ways we find to come to terms with the unbearable.

Somewhere in a small English seaside town, an Irishwoman approaching her sixtieth birthday makes and sells beautiful dolls. The bodies of the dolls are wooden, turned and carved for her by a man referred to only as the carpenter. She dresses them in wonderful, individualised clothing and she sells them to customers all around the world.

But as well as these, there are also the special dolls. The ones ordered by women who come into the shop and whisper in her ear. The ones whose wooden bodies are made to a precise weight. The ones that are handed over to the customer, not in the shop but at the Irishwoman’s home.

As the present day story unfolds - Mona’s sixtieth birthday, her tentative relationship with Karl, a neighbour who shares her insomnia, an annual trip in November that holds special significance – so we learn more and more about her past history: her early life in Ireland, her move to Birmingham, meeting her husband. They are poor and life is tough, but they are very much in love. Then, on the night that the IRA blows up a Birmingham pub – their life is split apart by tragedy.

This is a difficult book to review because the things I most want to write about risk spoiling the pleasure of peeling back the layers of the story and uncovering its mysteries step by step. It’s a very different story to de Waal’s debut, My Name is Leon, but her delicate prose shines through in the same way, as does her ability to create sympathetic characters with real depth of humanity.

De Waal is a champion of working class writing. (She is the editor and instigator of the anthology Common People, shortly to be published on Unbound.) Her characters are ordinary people from ordinary working class backgrounds. Her gift is to write about them without cliché and without being patronising – something you only realise is rare (among British writers in particular) when you take a step back.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Stay With Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀, My Counterfeit Self by Jane Davis, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories that revolve around bereavement and loss.

Perfect Accompaniment: A cup of tea and the smell of freshly turned wood

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gower

Review by JJ Marsh

What We Thought:

Two earthly lives intertwine, drawn to each other by creatures of the sea.

In the 18th century, women must be either lucky or clever. Angelica Neal is a courtesan, experienced in the arts of love, protected by her madam until one client takes her under his protection.
Jonah Hancock is a Deptford merchant, risking all he has on sea voyages to Macau and Java to procure fine china and profitable cargo.

His captain returns, without his ship. He sold the Calypso for the most unusual curiosity. A dessicated, furious sea-sprite, the furthest removed from one's idea of a mermaid imaginable. Yet the dreadful husk strikes fear into the populace of London, drawing folk of all ages and social class to witness its death mask. Mr Hancock profits handsomely and finds himself drawn into a wholly different world. Mrs Chappell's 'nunnery' or well-regarded whorehouse wishes to host the mermaid for a week of revelries. Mr Hancock is guest of honour. Things do not go according to plan.

Historical fiction doesn't get much better than this. The author's sympathies with the lot of women and comprehension of class permeate every chapter. Limited opportunities, social judgement and the currency of beauty is a delicate balance for a woman with no means other than looks and intellect. The ladies refer to their genitals as 'the commodity'.

This book fascinates and wears its research lightly. Stays, pins, phaetons, milk-soaked sheaths and powder capes are as incidental as the weather. Yet the things-we-do-not-understand loom large over the novel.

Taking something from its rightful place will curse you and yours. Shifting from one status to another is fraught with difficulty. In the final analysis, one must feel content in one's confinement or be released.

Gower builds a London as it was, and a cast of characters so real, spiteful, snobbish, kindly, humble, capricious and arrogant, one cannot help but want more.

You'll like this if you enjoyed: Sarah Waters, Rosie Garland, Angela Carter

Avoid if you dislike: The grim injustice of the female situation in the 18th century.

Ideal Accompaniments: Millefeuilles and sweet wine, or freshly shucked oysters and brine.

Genre: Literary fiction, historical fiction

Available on Amazon

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

If Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young relocates Shakespeare’s King Lear to modern India, then Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire takes as its inspiration an even older play – Sophocles’ Antigone – the tragic tale of a sister forbidden to bury the body of her rebel brother.

Like We That Are Young, Home Fire unfolds through a progression of points of view – two sisters of a brother induced to travel to Syria to work with the so-called Islamic State, the brother himself, the son of the British Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary.

Western media has been quick to paint all those who have been drawn into the net of the Islamic State as uniformly evil – and their families as either equally evil or ignorant dupes. Home Fire dares to look beyond the headlines at the human beings caught up in the apparently unending cycle of violence unleashed by terrorism and the ‘War on Terror.’

Layer upon layer, Shamsie peels back causes and connections, showing - but on a very human level - how ignorance and hatred on one side feed ignorance and hatred on the other. The actions of the terrorists cast the shadow of suspicion over every Muslim living in the West, affecting their daily lives in ways most of the rest of us never stop to think about. (Googling While Muslim, as the younger sister points out, is an activity fraught with risk, where you must avoid appearing curious about the ‘wrong’ sort of thing.) And on the other side, atrocities perpetrated in Abu Graib and Guantanamo become potent recruiting tools for the very terrorist organisations they were meant to defeat.

With an odd twist of prescience, Shamsie has created a Home Secretary who is UK’s first from a British Asian background – something which came to pass in real life while Home Fire was on the 2018 Bailey’s Prize shortlist. She nails some of the character and compromises that would be necessary to allow that to happen - the racist backlash that is unleashed the moment he appears compromised in the slightest way.

The final scene of the book is profoundly moving. Its central character is given a dignity in the face of impossible odds that mirrors that in the Greek tragedies that inspired it.

A powerful and important book that should be read by anyone wanting to find humanity beyond the headlines.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie; Antigone by Jean Anouilh, The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam

Avoid If You Dislike: Looking beyond tabloid headlines about terrorism

Perfect Accompaniment: A mug of the best coffee you can find and a quiet corner to drink it in

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon

Sight, by Jessie Greengrass

Review by JJ Marsh

What We Thought:

This was a tough one to like but eventually, I did. Greengrass allows her character to meander and ponder and consider the human condition in every aspect.

Relating the plot is pointless: a pregnant woman analyses herself, her reasons for wanting a second child, her reasons for wanting a first child, her inadequacies, her relationships with her own mother and psychoanalytical grandmother. She intersperses these reflections with other discoveries enabling insights into human beings. Röntgen, and the very first X-Ray of his wife's hand. He could see inside.

It's hugely introspective and at the same time inclusive, allowing the reader to develop thoughts and wander off on personal tangets. This book took far longer to read than the page count demanded.

The language arcs and swoops with such grace to leave one awed or occasionally confused.

'Revelation pended, the veil between myself and understanding was in a constant state of almost-rending, and I thought I could see shadows through it, the outlines of an as-yet uncomprehended truth, until all at once the mania crested and what came out of it, in place of elucidation, was agony, my head pinned in a vice, my body hanging limp below it, a disarticulated sack of bones and blood around which my limbs curled, stiff and liable to snap.'

Her analyses of other human-inspectors - Freud, Thompson, Röntgen - provides a wider perspective to this unnamed introvert as ballast to this vacillating between opinions, time and personal philosophy.

Stream-of-consciousness is a term often over-used and patronised, but here Greengrass uses it to best effect. Self-awareness is the only way to X-Ray the mind.

You'll enjoy this if you liked: Mrs Dalloway, Zoë Jenny, Scarlett Thomas

Avoid if you dislike: Self-examining narrators and lack of narrative

Ideal accompaniments: A fried egg, camomile tea and a still pond.

Genre: Literary fiction


Available on Amazon

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

It seems this is the year for revisiting classics. Hot on the heels of Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear) and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (a retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone) comes The Idiot by Elif Batuman. The Idiot is not precisely a retelling of Dostoevsky’s novel by the same name – but it clearly flows from the same well-spring.

The ‘idiot’ (or innocent) in this case is a young Turkish American woman arriving for her Freshman Year at Harvard University in the 1990s. The time period is important. Email is still a novelty – widely available at university but still a rarity in the wider world. Smart phones – or even cell phones – non-existent.

Free to choose what subjects to study, she makes an eclectic selection: linguistics, maths, ‘Constructed Worlds’ (a creative arts module), and Russian. On the Russian course, she acquires a new name (Sonya) and she also meets William, a Hungarian student in his senior year. She and William seem unable to hold a conversation face to face. But taking on the characters from a text they are studying in Russian, they begin a correspondence over email that becomes an obsession.

The Idiot perfectly captures that nihilistic stage of late adolescence. That feeling of being out of phase with the rest of the world. Desperately seeking meaning in the most mundane of words and actions – and feeling depressed because you fail to find it. The inevitable passion for someone just out of reach. Mistaking sophistry for sophistication.

The novel moves from Harvard in the depths of winter to Hungary in the summer, where ‘Sonya’ goes for a working holiday. The mood echoes that of a lot of 19th C Russian literature – that sense never quite living in the present but always longing for something that is just out of reach.

The novel also plays with ideas of what language is and what it can convey. The narrator at one point takes issue with her linguistics lecturer’s rejection of the notion that the language you speak affects the way you think. Turkish, she points out, has a case that is used specifically to convey that what you are saying is reported information, not firsthand knowledge. She argues that it forces you to constantly question your own objectivity.

An unusual first novel from someone who has previously explored similar themes in a non-fiction format.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Idiot by Dostoevsky, The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician by Tendai Huchu, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Avoid If You Dislike: Story lines that drift rather than drive

Perfect Accompaniment: Hungarian vodka

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Review by JJ Marsh

What We Thought

To state what happens in the book would give an impression of dark, bleak hopelessness, which is not the feeling it engenders in the process of reading. Ward's lyrical prose and descriptive talent transport the reader to the dusty yard, hot car, bland gas station, prison plantation and guarantees our sympathy. Somehow, no matter how miserable the situation, she manages to sustain hope.

The story is told through the eyes of a young boy, Jojo, and his mother, Leonie. From the start, there is a haunted atmosphere of loss, an absence of someone who should be there, but that someone is different for each of them. Leonie is a drug addict and neglectful mother, so that the most influential figure in Jojo's life is Pop, his grandfather. Pop teaches Jojo how to work the farm and tells him about the harsh days when he was in Parchman Penitentiary. Pop's sadness is both for the past and the present, as his wife is dying of cancer. Meanwhile, Leonie is preparing to drive across the state to meet Michael, her lover and father of her children, when he gets out of jail. And she wants to take Jojo and his little sister Kayla with her.

Part road trip, part social critique, part American nightmare, this beautifully written novel makes us feel the weight of the past in a visceral sense. There is an inexorable feeling of tragedy, as if we know what must happen in the end, but cannot help hoping things will turn out differently. The book won America's National Book Award 2017 and was selected as Book of the Year by The New York Times amongst others. I can see why.

You'll like this if you enjoyed: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward or Meridian by Alice Walker.

Avoid if you dislike: Dysfunctional families, violence, ghosts.

Ideal accompaniments: Gravy and biscuits with a glass of cold water

Genre: Literary fiction

Available on Amazon