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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Suzi Feay |David Annand |Alice Jolly |Randy Boyagoda
There is a fashion for leaving central characters and narrators nameless, presenting reviewers with a headache. It is hard to avoid clunky, repetitive periphrasis (“the narrator”, “the student”, “the lover”), and there remains the nagging fear that you’ve missed the one reference or allusion. Yet the device can be powerful. While a name implies stability and consistency over time, when applied to the psyche it can be akin to putting a label on a whirlwind.
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Alice Jolly |David Annand |Suzi Feay |Randy Boyagoda
Alice Chadwick’s impressive debut novel unfolds within a twenty-four-hour period in a nameless small town in 1980s England. Teenagers, out on a hot summer evening, wander between the weir, a party, the off-licence. Robin has sex with Jonah, who is the boyfriend of her best friend, Tin. As “the whole teenage comedy unfolds”, no one realizes that a tragedy is also taking place.
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | David Annand |Suzi Feay |Alice Jolly |Randy Boyagoda
The football novel has a problem. The thing that is most interesting about the sport, to most novelists at least, is the tribalism it engenders, the way it stirs passions, demands loyalty and delineates groups.
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2 months ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Randy Boyagoda |Toby Lichtig |Kevin Brazil |Claire Lowdon
The opening sequence of Kev Lambert’s May Our Joy Endure signals the novel’s intent. Lambert devotes whole pages of prose to the sights, sounds and smells, and the inner lives of guests, at a decadent birthday party at a private residence in a skyscraper in Montreal. Suggestive of the novel’s larger dynamics, the paragraph-length sentences pile up to balance on a one-word, standalone sentence: “Céline”.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
ft.com | Randy Boyagoda
On this book’s first page, we learn two things. First, that the main character wishes that her cancer-stricken mother “would die soon”.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Randy Boyagoda
Haruki Murakami’s new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features an imaginary world that is both intricate and baffling: A parallel universe contains a walled city, which contains a library, which contains orbs that contain people’s dreams. Exploring them is an unnamed, middle-aged narrator accompanied by a teenage girl whom he somehow met decades ago.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Christian Cooper |Aubrey Hartman |Tony Keith Jr. |Randy Boyagoda
The Urban Owls: How Flaco and Friends Made the City Their Home Making his picture book debut, Cooper (Better Living Through Birding, for adults) catalogs a handful of wild owls who have taken up residence in New York City, starting with Flaco, the famous Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo: “He flew and flew and flew! If you’d been stuck in a cage your whole life, wouldn’t you?” Barry the barred owl, a keen hunter, attracts devoted sightseers because of her dependable...
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Randy Boyagoda |Aubrey Hartman |Tony Keith Jr. |Cheryl Hudson
Sixteen-year-old Sabel is puzzled by tonight’s family meal, which seems to be a special spread of her and her four siblings’ favorite foods. Sickness and savagery have toppled the world, their home country is plagued by bombings, the president is dead, thugs roam the streets, and goods like this feast are scarce. Following dinner, a black bus with tinted windows whisks the five youths away, leaving their parents behind.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Tony Keith Jr. |Randy Boyagoda |Cheryl Hudson |Aubrey Hartman
Aubrey Hartman. Little, Brown, $17.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-3165-7572-0Clare, the undead fox of Deadwood Forest, is cast as a monster by the local children who gather each Halloween around the forest’s edge to chant about how he “waits to feast/ On little bones.” But Clare isn’t a monster: he’s an Usher, one who helps wandering souls find their way to their respective afterlife, be it Peace, Pleasure, Progress, or Pain.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Randy Boyagoda
This article contains spoilers for Playground. From paintings on ancient cave walls to parables, fables, and memes, animals have served as important storytelling tools.
