We’re more than halfway through the month of #MARM and today is Margaret Atwood’s 80th birthday. Naomi and I are supposed to be deep into discussions about The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments (her spoiler-free launch of The Ts discussion is here). But I’ve still got my head in
There is a line in Steven Price’s 2016 novel, By Gaslight, which seems to suit his new novel generally: “Everything is about the dead.” And another which seems even more appropriate: “The truth that is found in a story is a different kind of truth, but it is not
Another writer might have titled this story “Summer Games”. But in using a French title, Gallant’s English readers are immediately, if only for a brief moment, inhabiting an unfamiliar place. We have a hint of what’s to come. We are to expect something like the collection’s first story, “By
When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a teenager. In a few years, I would start to keep records about my reading: a log and handwritten (or typed( passages that I favoured along the way. The log in a notebook (usually practical rather than pretty) and the
Along the way, I’ve missed only one of David Bezmozgis’ books. The last novel of his I read was The Free World and, reading through the quotations I saved from that reading, I was struck by how many older passages resonate with this new collection. Here is one which
