Here’s the part where I put aside Lauren Carter’s This Has Nothing to Do With You, this passage about Melony Barrett: “I couldn’t have known what would be waiting when I woke up, that I’d spent the night on the rapidly diminishing surface of my childhood, that last patch
If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry. But what a
From the opening lines of Five Little Indians, debut author Michelle Good prepares readers. There are snares and ghosts, silvery and summery glimmers, and there is also warmth. (There’s also the requisite discussion of semantics—‘Indian’ or ‘Aboriginal’—reminding readers that nomenclature and self-identification is not a matter of consensus in
Originally inspired by the 1918-2018 centenary of the Spanish Flu, Emma Donoghue began writing this novel in the tradition of her historical novels like Slammerkin and The Wonder. Her author’s note includes this statistic: “The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3
In Imagining Ancient Women (2011), Annabel Lyon declares that “literary fiction is uniquely poised to perform an important ethical function in our lives—namely to teach us compassion”. She warns of the pitfalls: moral outrage, forbidden love, and excessive decoration. All of which she avoids in Consent. So much so,
