Reading Becoming Lin reminded me of discovering Marilyn French's The Women's Room and Marge Piercy's Small Changes. Two unapologetically feminist novels which I felt had poured out of my own heart into some other writer's story. I inhaled these books, and I felt the same sense of intense recognition and
It begins with something extraordinary. "Almost a decade earlier, a man with a .45-70 Marlin hunting rifle walked through the front doors of Avalon Hills prep school. He didn't know that he was about to become a living symbol of the age of white men shooting into crowds." House
Having stories narrated by - or assembled via - a number of voices is a popular way of world-building. Each of the following books plays with this technique, allowing different perspectives to combine and create a more credible space for readers to inhabit. Just as in Meg Wolitzer's The Position, the matriarch
One woman, one newspaper: The Native Voice is a story with relevance far beyond any existing borders, as well as a work of importance for local historians in what is now called British Columbia, Canada. Caitlin Press, 2016 Eric Jamieson's book is of fundamental interest to any reader
If a story's beginning looks at its reflection in a room made of mirrors, does it see its own beginning-self reflected back? Or is the reflection actually the story's ending? Hamish Hamilton, 2016 This is the kind of question that I can imagine keeps Jay Hosking up late
