John Boyne (http://johnboyne.com/) was born in Dublin, where he still lives. His first short story was published by the Sunday Tribune and in 1993 was shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia. He has chaired the jury for the […]
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Joan Silber (http://joansilber.net/?page_id=18) is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of Household Words (Penguin Books, 1981), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award, and Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (W.W. Norton, 2004), which was a finalist for both the 2004 National Book Award and the Story Prize. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital. A boy named David sits beside her. She is not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story
Elif Batuman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman) is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Her 2017 novel The Idiot concerns a college undergraduate, Selin, attending Harvard. The title is a conscious echo of the novel by Dostoyevski. Selin has a conversation with her university friend Svetlana about whether or not one’s life should be thought of
Min Jin Lee (https://www.minjinlee.com/) was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up in New York. In 2017 Lee released this novel , which is an epic historical tale following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. It is the
American novelist Christpher Bollen (http://www.christopherbollen.com/) writes psychologically probing fiction in the style of John Updike and Jeffrey Eugenides. His third novel is a swift moving thriller. The summary is as follows. Arriving on the Greek island of Patmos broke and humiliated, Ian Bledsoe is fleeing the emotional and financial fallout from his father’s death.
The reality of Winter in Scotland has been brought home in these early days of March 2018. Perhaps at home with a few hours to kill between blizzards, you could enjoy an appropriate piece of fiction by Bernard MacLaverty. This is Midwinter Break, and the summary is as follows. A retired couple, Gerry and
Life in a small market town like Lanark has its charms and frustrations. There you glimpse its fat cats and notice its small fry, its friendly locals and its entrenched conservatism. But what lies behind the faces of folk at the supermarket veg stall, the petrol station, at the leisure centre, at the Summer gala
This novel by Amitav Ghosh (https://amitavghosh.com/bio.html) charts the lives of Rajkumar Raha and his family, starting in Mandalay, where he finds himself stranded when the sampan he is working on breaks down. Rajkumar stays on as a restaurant worker, and witnesses the British depose and deport the last king of Burma, Thebaw, and his family,
