The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction lodged in my mind because I really loved its inaugural winner: Kadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust when I first read it. Bill and I read it again earlier this year, while anticipating the announcement of this year’s shortlisted books.
Sometimes summer is a slow reading time for me, but this year? The opposite! The stacks were swelling in May and June, and every flat surface was cluttered with books begun-but-unfinished, and I didn’t have a chance to think about what else I might do…so, I read.
Like the sand dollar that Rhoda’s father slips into his pocket, this is a gritty story. Her sister Joanne repatriated their father, with an air passage to back the claim, and now he has come to live with Joanne. “Then waja come here for?” “Because Regan sent me on
If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
It’s a hot and overcast August morning, too early for the neighbourhood to have awakened. On another morning it might seem peaceful; this morning it feels abandoned. The grass in the park next door is patchy and dry, even though the humidity is high and a woman with two
