![]() ![]() The protagonist’s wealthy, white boyfriend is the physical manifestation of not only social differences but covert expressions of discomfort. Brown narrates the subtleties of the Black female experience in a truly absorbing way. The unnamed character, a young Black woman, materially has what everyone strives for, but she struggles with assimilation and control. Natasha Brown’s slight novel Assembly is no exception. There seems to be a theme in the books I’ve enjoyed lately: they are all stories that reveal the inner thoughts of a person. I liked the way Johnson articulates the psychological chatter that is usually kept to oneself. The novel follows a complex heroine, Vivian, who navigates dating, her career and family trauma. Post-Traumatic by Chantal V Johnson is about a woman in her 20s who is morally flawed in a way that felt realistic. In this wide-ranging novel and richly detailed book, Baines’s personal journey through life is informed by politics and world events from the Cuban missile crisis to Brexit and Covid.Īs there are many parallels between the protagonist’s biography and the author’s, this book appears to be McEwan’s summation work, in which the author’s views on art, politics, religion, medical ethics, climate change, life’s choices and so on are discussed via the protagonist. It surveys the life of Roland Baines from his first piano lesson at boarding school to his old age. Lessons by Ian McEwan is the best novel I’ve read in the past few years. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at. More enticingly, the novel takes place on the French Riviera in a bohemian hotel run by Penelope’s parents, helping me to imagine a delicious summer by the sea.Īlison by Lizzy Stewart is out in paperback on 3 August (Serpent’s Tail £12.99). She refers to her ongoing “Anthology of hates” which speaks to the dormant adolescent in me. So far the first narrator, 14-year-old Penelope, is delighting me with her frank and precocious voice. I’ve just started reading A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau, a coming-of-age novel from the 50s recently repackaged by Daunt. It’s a beautiful adventure story (even though most of it takes place in the grounds of a single house) that celebrates curiosity and science through the eye of a unique and compelling narrator. It’s the story of Alma Whittaker, a woman born at the turn of the 19th century into a strange and brilliant botanical dynasty. A friend handed me a copy of The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert which absolutely fits this mould. ![]() And what else? he thought.If it’s not a tiny, perfectly formed novella then the other thing I’m craving is something sweeping and absorbing that helps me recapture something of the rabid desperation of my teenage reading habits. ![]() He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. "Katherine."Īnd he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had wanted love and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that. “Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.” It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living if it had ever been. “He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. ![]()
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