Reading about Sabrina Ramnanan's love of Anne of Green Gables made me really want to read the debut novelist's Nothing Like Love. And it's a good thing that I understood this about her reading past, because it prepared me perfectly for her prose style. Random House CanadaDoubleday Canada, 2015
It's not impossible to find them, but if you read a lot of literary fiction, the novels which contain humour are outnumbered. Each of these books actually addresses a serious issue (or touches upon it, for Susan Juby's novel doesn't delve very deeply): global warming and habitat erosion, family farm
There are "ways of making people into ghosts". So Atticus say, to Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird, about Boo (Arthur) Radley. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 Neil Smith turned Oliver Dalrymple into a ghost in Boo. And, then, he named him Boo and gave him a Casper the Friendly Ghost
A new Friday fugue, concluding this week, considering the ways in which our working lives appear on the pages of novels and short stories. (Previous weeks can be viewed here, here and here, if you're keen.) Riverhead, 2013 Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Sally Mann's Hold Still is a photographer's memoir; although she has kept a journal since she was a girl, her love of imagery is deeply rooted, and it's hard to imagine her memoir taking any other form. Currently represented by the Gagosian Gallery, her CV is impressive and extensive, but
