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.
In Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, she shares this admission: “In a technical way, I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do. (I take flights.) I don’t really inhabit it. I have never bought a book with Climate Change in the title
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
I’ve loved the idea of a character named Maybe since I read Katheen Martin’s novel, Penny Maybe, about a sixteen-year-old girl working out all the possibilities ahead of her. Isn’t it just perfect for a coming-of-age story? And, indeed, in Andrea MacPherson’s novel, Maybe Collins is eleven years old
