Barry's bookshelf: read-for-review en-US Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:02:30 -0800 60 Barry's bookshelf: read-for-review 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Limbic 60176944 Limbic is Peter Scalpello’s glittering ode to sex, intimacy, and queer discovery. Taking us on slippery nights out fuelled by chemsex, on drunken lads� holidays, and into the quiet violence of small domestic moments, this is a world where tracksuits hide queer desire, where shame masks vulnerability, where wallets hide wraps of crystal meth.

From the eager trepidation of teenage sex, to the ecstasy of parties, to the stigma around HIV, Limbic is at once a therapy and a celebration, showing how queer learning can be both soft-edged and brutal at once. An exploration of masculinity, addiction and trauma, this is a revelatory collection of poems; wise, tender, and vital.]]> 96 Peter Scalpello 1838390049 Barry 4 4.01 Limbic
author: Peter Scalpello
name: Barry
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/27
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: 21st-century, poetry, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Ripcord 220525206 192 Nate Lippens 1739364961 Barry 4 4.00 Ripcord
author: Nate Lippens
name: Barry
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Morning and Evening 221326443 Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.]]> 104 Jon Fosse 1804271217 Barry 3 4.22 2000 Morning and Evening
author: Jon Fosse
name: Barry
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Romeo & Seahorse 218527171
With chaotic chemsex escapades and musings on romantic love, art and belonging, Romeo & Seahorse takes us to places not often explored in fiction. Written in a relentless, frenzied first-person narrative with moments of mind-bending wisdom and poignancy, this is a one-of-a-kind novel about addiction, desire, belonging, and want that’s destined to become a queer classic.

"Romeo & Seahorse punctures the mythology of love with the tyranny of desire until everything bleeds out onto the carpet of domesticity left outside to rot in the musty weather. Yes, this is a book about addiction that actually hurts—spinning between tragedy and a happy ending, between absolute delusion and cynical collapse, between fire and emptiness, honesty and meltdown. So matter-of-fact that it becomes dissociated, so dissociated that it flails with embodiment, Romeo & Seahorse is a novel that crushes the novel form and hands it to you to smoke in a glass pipe that shatters with your complicity."
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art]]> 170 Nikolaj Tange Lange 191700804X Barry 3 3.88 2022 Romeo & Seahorse
author: Nikolaj Tange Lange
name: Barry
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2024, read-for-review
review:

]]> Napalm in the Heart 216033307
In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.

After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.]]> 243 Pol Guasch 0571375251 Barry 4 excellent! 3.39 2021 Napalm in the Heart
author: Pol Guasch
name: Barry
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2024, read-for-review
review:
excellent!
]]> My Heavenly Favourite 179849973 I heard you laughing from time to time and you stayed lying there on the flattened hay, and after you left, your body's imprint was left behind, and I rested my hand on the dry blades of grass that were still slightly warm and I wanted to carry on feeling you forever, really I did, but everything changed when you began to speak to me, on 7 July to be precise.

In the tempestuous summer of 2005, on a day that is as hot as the inside of a bovine, a 14-year-old farmer's daughter makes friends with the local veterinarian who looks after her father's cows. He has reached 'the biblical age of seven times seven' and is trying to escape trauma, while she is trying to escape into a world of fantasy. Their obsessive reliance on each other's stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small Dutch community apart.

Indelible, audacious and impossible-to-put-down, this novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose. With its literary sleight and magnifying glass on human instinct, My Heavenly Favourite establishes Rijneveld as one of the bravest and brilliant writers on the world stage.

Praise for The Discomfort of Evening: 'Exceptional.' Financial Times / 'Exhilarating.' Independent / 'Luminous.' Observer / 'Beautifully wild.' Guardian]]> 336 Lucas Rijneveld 0571375499 Barry 4 3.51 2020 My Heavenly Favourite
author: Lucas Rijneveld
name: Barry
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/16
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2024, read-for-review
review:
Reviewed on my Substack:
]]> Tremor 91937531 256 Teju Cole 0571283357 Barry 4 3.84 2023 Tremor
author: Teju Cole
name: Barry
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2023/11/20
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Baumgartner 123412619 208 Paul Auster 0571384935 Barry 2 3.84 2023 Baumgartner
author: Paul Auster
name: Barry
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/13
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Blackouts 156918250
As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, lives, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of pathology and oppression. Charged with sifting through Juan's belongings, our narrator uncovers a copy of Sex A Study in Homosexual Patterns , its pages blacked out, censored, reduced down to poetic dispatches. And, as he sifts through the manuscript, another story is that of Jan Gay - a radical, queer anthropologist - whose ground-breaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.

Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, on the ways in which stories sustain histories. Both emotionally and intellectually daring, Justin Torres blends fact with fiction - drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and image - force us to look again at the world we have inherited and the narratives we have received.]]> 321 Justin Torres 1847087981 Barry 3 3.89 2023 Blackouts
author: Justin Torres
name: Barry
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2023/11/07
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Nineteen Steps 198972560
Londyn, rok 1942, trwa II wojna światowa. Niemieckie bombardowania nieustannie dają się we znaki mieszkańcom stolicy. We wschodniej dzielnicy miasta, Bethnal Green, mieszka osiemnastoletnia Nellie Morris. Mimo trudów wojny cieszy się kochającą rodziną, gronem oddanych przyjaciół oraz pracą asystentki burmistrzyni. Pewnego dnia poznaje przystojnego Raya, amerykańskiego pilota stacjonującego w pobliżu. Pomimo początkowej niechęci dziewczyny okazuje się, że miłość może rozkwitnąć nawet w najmroczniejszych czasach. Gdy Nellie nieśmiało zaczyna snuć plany o szczęśliwej przyszłości, wojna brutalnie niszczy jej marzenia. Podczas jednego z nalotów dochodzi do tragedii, a świat dziewczyny rozpada się na kawałki. I nie są temu winne wyłącznie niemieckie bomby...

Jak Nellie postąpi w obliczu dylematów moralnych? Czy jej rodzina poradzi sobie z niewyobrażalną stratą? I najważniejsze: czy miłość uleczy najgłębsze rany?]]> 380 Millie Bobby Brown 0008648646 Barry 1 tasteless. 3.66 2023 Nineteen Steps
author: Millie Bobby Brown
name: Barry
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/09/20
date added: 2023/09/20
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
tasteless.
]]> The Wren, The Wren 64657673 An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet� with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.� In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.]]> 283 Anne Enright Barry 4 3.69 2023 The Wren, The Wren
author: Anne Enright
name: Barry
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2023/09/01
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
another bop from Anne THEE Enright.
]]> Sea Change 149108567 ‘Absolutely stunning ... Full of longing, mystery, fear and hope. I loved this book to pieces!� Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars.

Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at an aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (mountain dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager.

When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro has one last chance to come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.

‘Utterly original� � Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
‘Sea Change stole my big weirdo heart� - Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl]]> 266 Gina Chung 1761268112 Barry 2 3.10 2023 Sea Change
author: Gina Chung
name: Barry
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/22
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
there's simply just too much going on here.
]]> Okay Days 62831265
‘Utterly immersive ... it's reminiscent of Sally Rooney and is a complex and joyous ode to being in love, messing up and finding your way� � Stylist

Sam is 28, Swedish, carefree and chaotic. Doing a work placement in London over the course of three sticky summer months, she falls hard for Lucas, a man she first met as a teenager. Lucas, 27, sensitive and calm, is trying to get a start on adult life while struggling to hold the pieces of his life together. Sam is a gorgeous distraction. But you can only avoid reality for so long, and both Sam and Lucas know their relationship can't last. Nobody can be this happy forever, surely?

Okay Days tells the story of the rise and fall of Sam and Lucas's affection for each other, looks unflinchingly at male body dysmorphia and women's reproductive rights, and the pitfalls of modern love. When is okay good enough? And what are we willing to lose in the search for a life that is much better than just okay?

‘A beautifully-observed portrait of self-discovery and uncertain love. Jenny's sharp and evocative prose gave me a feeling of immense nostalgia for London's long summer days� � Natasha Brown, author of Assembly

‘Fresh and sharply observant ... One of the most intriguing books I've read in some time� � Elaine Feeney, author of How To Build A Boat

‘Tender and spellbinding, Okay Days breaks you all the way open� � Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak

‘An intimate drama of what matters in stories: relationships. Mustard is a talented portraitist in whose hands these two characters become real, enthralling, and viscerally realized. It is one of the most entertaining novels I have read of the times we live in� � Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen]]> 340 Jenny Mustard 1399713469 Barry 1 3.73 2023 Okay Days
author: Jenny Mustard
name: Barry
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Big Swiss 62086892 Greta liked knowing people's secrets. That wasn't a problem. Until she met Big Swiss.

Big Swiss. That's Greta's nickname for her - she is tall, and she is from Switzerland. Greta can see her now: dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. She's a head-turner: including the heads of infants and dogs.

Well that's how Greta imagines seeing her; they haven't actually ever met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland.

Greta and Big Swiss are not in the same room, or even the same building. Greta is miles away, sitting at a desk in her own house, wearing only headphones, fingerless gloves, a kimono, and legwarmers, transcribing this disembodied voice.

What Greta doesn't know is that she's about to bump into Big Swiss in the local dog park. A new - and not entirely honest - relationship is going to be born.

A relationship that will transform both of their lives. . .

'Big Swiss is a dark party; a hilarious romp through new age pop psychology, romantic obsession, sapphic acrobatics, dogs, and the desire to end it all . . .]]> 336 Jen Beagin 0571378552 Barry 4 the <i>donks</i>. 3.70 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Barry
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/22
date added: 2023/05/22
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
the donks.
]]> Never Was 92697355 Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction, transmasculinity and class, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt- mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented.

Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged relative Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.

Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they’re in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bewitching and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.]]> 329 H. Gareth Gavin 1739784960 Barry 2 3.81 2023 Never Was
author: H. Gareth Gavin
name: Barry
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/04/05
date added: 2023/04/05
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Biography of X 124925577 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey 1783789271 Barry 4 3.91 2023 Biography of X
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Barry
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/04
date added: 2023/04/04
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
i need to know more about the painters' massacre of 1943.
]]> Birnam Wood 61399435 Birnam Wood is on the move...

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 434 Eleanor Catton 1783784261 Barry 3 3.92 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Barry
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/04
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:
I think this is one of those ones where I'll either praise it or trash it entirely depending on the day
]]> The Springs of Affection 63119457 In Brennan's acute hands, this proverbial phrase has more sorrow than joy about it, and in the collection's two other sequences, the emotions are far more raw. Husbands and wives are deadlocked in loveless marriages--the men longing for escape, the women desperate for contact. These are visions of powerful feelings, powerfully quelled, and there are some heart-freezing juxtapositions. One story ends with a young couple coming together; in the very next, 27 years later, ill will is everywhere.

But Brennan, whose life seems to have been even more tragic than that of any of her characters, can also anatomize peace, or at least respite. In "The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It," Mrs. Bagot and her child and pets (also on the shakiest of ground with Mr. Bagot) fall into an afternoon slumber. "They all slept safely. There wasn't a sound in the house. Nobody came to the door. Nobody saw them. There on the bed they might all have been invisible, or enchanted, or, as they were for that time, forgotten." Alas, such states of grace are momentary in Brennan's houses. According to William Maxwell, the title novella--a brilliant anatomy of envy and hate--"belongs with the great short stories of this century." So do several other pieces in The Springs of Affection.

]]> Maeve Brennan Barry 3 4.18 1996 The Springs of Affection
author: Maeve Brennan
name: Barry
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/10
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves: 20th-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> I Have Some Questions for You 75368205
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past: the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletics coach, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, Bodie prefers-needs-to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when The Granby School invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought-if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

One of the most acclaimed contemporary American writers, Rebecca Makkai reinvents herself with each of her brilliant novels. Both a transfixing mystery and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, I Have Some Questions for You is her finest achievement yet.]]> 448 Rebecca Makkai 0349727201 Barry 4 3.78 2023 I Have Some Questions for You
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Barry
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/10
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2023
review:

]]> Love, Leda 63577939 It’s mid morning. Cool. Not many coffee bars open. I, the brave one, god of any telephone kiosk, walk down Dean Street, see the man of the day; raincoat, shoulders round, hair black, falling out; heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell. Bold as brass I cross the road stopping dead in front of him. He raises his eyes, so sadly that I love him for it.

Leda is lost. Bouncing from job to job, from coffee bar to house party, he spends his days watching the hours pass and waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bedsits with near strangers, as Leda is forced to find intimacy in unusual places.

Semi-homeless and estranged from his given family, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession � one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction.

This newly discovered, never-before-published novel � which pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 � is a portrait of a lost Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked.

Mark Hyatt was born in South London in 1940, and died by suicide outside Blackburn in 1972. His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). Hyatt received little or no formal education, and learned to read and write as an adult. Love, Leda (c. 1965) is his only known novel.]]> 176 Mark Hyatt 1913512215 Barry 3 3.78 2023 Love, Leda
author: Mark Hyatt
name: Barry
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/14
date added: 2022/12/14
shelves: 20th-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> 1000 Coils of Fear 55886503
A young woman attends a play about the Berlin Wall coming down and is the only Black person in the audience.

She is sitting with her boyfriend by a bathing lake and four neo-Nazis show up.

In New York, she witnesses Trump's election victory in a strange hotel room and later awakes to panicked messages from friends.

Engaging in a witty question and answer with herself, the narrator looks at our rapidly changing times and tells the story of her family: her mother, who was a punk in East Germany and never had the freedom she dreamed of and her absent Angolan father. But in the background of everything is the memory of her twin brother, who died when they were nineteen.

Emotional and funny, Olivia Wenzel writes about loneliness and finding joy in life within the roles that society assigns you. 1000 Coils of Fear is a highly original novel both powerfully poetic and full of surprises.]]> 288 Olivia Wenzel 0349702012 Barry 1 3.49 2020 1000 Coils of Fear
author: Olivia Wenzel
name: Barry
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2022/11/20
date added: 2022/11/20
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
gonna presume this was a lot more subversive and damning in Germany.
]]> <![CDATA[Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta]]> 63336469
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

Written with the same astonishing verve of  Delicious Foods , which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta  sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.]]> 300 James Hannaham Barry 5 3.97 2022 Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
author: James Hannaham
name: Barry
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/17
date added: 2022/11/17
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
gonna shove this book down the throats of every fucker i see
]]> Anon Pls. 61028190 From the creator behind @DeuxMoi, the popular - and infamous - celebrity gossip Instagram account, comes a fun, charming debut novel that's a perfect combination of Devil Wears Prada, Gossip Girl, and Smile and Look Pretty. Anon Pls. is for those looking for a fun escape and anyone who wonders, "What's it really like to be DeuxMoi?"

When Cricket Lopez, assistant to one of the most notorious celebrity stylists, revamps her old style Instagram account and turns it into a celebrity gossip blog on a drunken whim, she never thinks it will become anything. It's just a way to blow off steam after a terrible, terrible day at work where her nightmarish boss screams at her and blames her for some 18-year-old influencer's screw-up. But when the account grows overnight and, even wilder, when she starts getting gossip from fans - juicy gossip - she has to face her Instagram is now famous. She is now famous.

Though no one knows that she is behind the account, its newfound success is affecting her real life. Her boss wonders why she's disappearing on the job, her friends are increasingly irritated by her dedication to the account, and she has celebrities, investors, and journalists approaching her with bright-eyed interest. Plus, there's a steamy new love interest who she meets through her online persona--except she has no idea if she can truly trust his motives. But as the account grows and becomes more and more famous, she has to is it - the fame, the insider access, the escape from real life - really worth losing everything she has?]]> 287 DeuxMoi 0063257823 Barry 2 uhhh 3.61 2022 Anon Pls.
author: DeuxMoi
name: Barry
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2022/11/14
date added: 2022/11/14
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
uhhh
]]> Fever 60105484 A multi-award winning Italian debut, from a bold and original new voice in contemporary queer literature.


Jonathan is 31 years old, living in Milan with his boyfriend of three years and their two Devon Rex cats when, on a day like any other, he gets a fever. But unlike most, this fever doesn’t go away; it’s constant, low-level, and exhausting. After spending weeks Googling his symptoms and documenting his illness, he finally sees a doctor. A series of blood tests, anxious visits to hospitals, and repeated misdiagnoses ensue, until the truth is finally revealed: Jonathan is HIV-positive.


As Jonathan comes to terms with what this diagnosis will mean for him, his future, and his relationships, he also takes the reader back in time, in search of his history, to the suburbs where he grew up, and from which he feels he has escaped: Rozzano, the ghetto of Milan, and of Italy’s north. In the vein of Édouard Louis and Virginie Despentes, Fever is at once a deeply personal story and a searing examination of class, poverty, prejudice, and opportunity in modern Europe.]]> 352 Jonathan Bazzi 1913348830 Barry 2 3.11 2019 Fever
author: Jonathan Bazzi
name: Barry
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2022/10/10
date added: 2022/10/10
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Morbid Obsessions 62826167
In Morbid Obsessions, Alison Rumfitt and Frankie Miren explore these questions and talk about the crossover in the ways they chose to approach them in their novels Tell Me I’m Worthless (Cipher Press) and The Service (Influx Press), covering the pornographic interest in sex workers and trans women, online violence, moral panic, creative representation, and paying tribute to sex worker and trans activism through fiction.

Frank, funny, and hopeful, and featuring two new stories and an introduction by writer and historian Morgan M. Page, Morbid Obsessions is an urgent and vital conversation about making art as collective struggle.]]> 112 Frankie Miren 1739784952 Barry 4 4.28 2022 Morbid Obsessions
author: Frankie Miren
name: Barry
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/25
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
Big Issue review here:
]]> <![CDATA[Whatever Happened To Queer Happiness?]]> 61262071
Exploring the lives of artists and writers from the past, current discourse around queerness and his own experiences, Brazil argues that art and literature needs to move away from celebrating the pain of queerness and embracing all the positive, ecstatic, collective joy that queer culture produces.

Brazil’s enlivening ideas around queerness combat the isolation of individuality and shame, instead championing collectivity, commonality, and visions of shared pleasure; offering both critique and a way of remaking the world.

A timely, eminently readable and fascinating book for all readers of creative non-fiction, Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? is a work of literature that will reverberate for years to come.]]> 231 Kevin Brazil 1910312959 Barry 4 3.25 Whatever Happened To Queer Happiness?
author: Kevin Brazil
name: Barry
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/30
date added: 2022/08/30
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Bolla 58015189
Kosovo is a country on the cusp of a dreadful war. Arsim is twenty-two, newly married, cautious - an Albanian trying to keep his head down and finish his studies in an atmosphere of creeping threat. Until he encounters Milos, a Serb, and begins a life in secret.

Bolla is the story of what happens when passion and history collide - when a relationship, already forbidden and laced with danger, is ripped apart by war and migration, separated by nations and fate.

What happens when you are forced to live a life that is not yours, so far from your desires?

Can the human remain?]]> 240 Pajtim Statovci 0571361331 Barry 5 call milošević by your name. 3.98 2019 Bolla
author: Pajtim Statovci
name: Barry
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/09
date added: 2022/08/16
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2022, read-for-review
review:
call milošević by your name.
]]> <![CDATA[The Disappearance of Josef Mengele]]> 46002075
For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world’s journalists. In this rigorusly researched factual novel—drawn almost entirely from historical documents—Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century.]]> 224 Olivier Guez 1788735889 Barry 4 3.90 2014 The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
author: Olivier Guez
name: Barry
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/31
date added: 2022/07/31
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> All This Could Be Different 61398796
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 312 Sarah Thankam Mathews 1474624774 Barry 3 3.69 2022 All This Could Be Different
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Barry
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Life Ceremony 60430648 From the author of international bestseller Convenience Store Woman comes a collection of short fiction: weird, out of this world and like nothing you’ve read before.

An engaged couple falls out over the husband’s dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Published in English for the first time, this exclusive edition also includes the story that first brought Sayaka Murata international acclaim: ‘A Clean Marriage�, which tells the story of a happily asexual couple who must submit to some radical medical procedures if they are to conceive a longed-for child.

Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.]]> 266 Sayaka Murata 1783787376 Barry 3 3.70 2019 Life Ceremony
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Barry
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/08
date added: 2022/07/08
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Venomous Lumpsucker 61372876 Venomous Lumpsucker is a speculative literary thriller for the age of Extinction Rebellion.

The near future. With tens of thousands of species dying out every year, our last hope is the biobanks, impregnable vaults where their remnants can be preserved forever. Until one day an audacious cyberattack obliterates every single one.

In the aftermath, a troubled conservationist and a crooked mining exec must team up in search of the venomous lumpsucker, a lost fish that they both desperately need to save. Together, they pursue it through the weird landscapes of the 2030s - a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the Baltic Sea; the dangerous hinterlands of a totalitarian state. And the further they go, the deeper they're drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?]]> 294 Ned Beauman 1473613558 Barry 3 3.63 2022 Venomous Lumpsucker
author: Ned Beauman
name: Barry
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/05
date added: 2022/07/06
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
well there goes my memoir title
]]> All Down Darkness Wide 55606059 A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.]]> 208 Seán Hewitt 1787333388 Barry 4 4.34 2022 All Down Darkness Wide
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Barry
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/19
date added: 2022/06/20
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2022, read-for-review
review:

]]> Edith 60182665 Martina Devlin, an award-winning columnist for the ԻԻԳ and podcaster for Dublin City of Literature #CityofBooks, has delivered a new novel based on the life of Irish novelist Edith Somerville

In this work, set during the turbulent period of Irish Independence 1921�22, Somerville finds herself at a crossroads. Her position as a member of the Ascendancy is perilous as she struggles to keep her family home, Drishane House in West Cork, while others are burned out. After years in a successful writing partnership with Violet Martin, Edith continues to write after her partner’s death, comforted in the belief they continue to connect through automatic writing and séances.

Against a backdrop of Civil War politics and lawlessness erupting across the country via IRA flying columns, people across Ireland are forced to consider where their loyalties lie.

In Edith, Devlin limns a vivid historical context in this story of proto-feminist Edith Somerville courageously trying to keep home and heart in one piece.

The story of Somerville and Ross is unique in the history of Irish women writers. Academic Shawn R. Mooney described these best-selling authors as ‘undeniably New Women: single, educated and economically independent writers whose lives and literary collaboration were unique manifestations of late-nineteenth century feminist strivings toward political and sexual equality�. Devlin depicts Edith in the round, suffering from loss, striving for safety, and keeping hold of hope in this captivating narrative set in the early years of a nascent state � a triumph of ventriloquism rooted in a society on the cusp of change.]]> 288 Martina Devlin 1843518309 Barry 0 3.89 Edith
author: Martina Devlin
name: Barry
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/16
date added: 2022/05/23
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Either/Or 58757675 SELIN IS THE LUCKIEST PERSON IN HER The only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's her second year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with her? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel-a life worthy of becoming a novel-without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself?Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice - no matter the cost. Next on the international travel.Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either / Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 432 Elif Batuman 1787333868 Barry 4 4.11 2022 Either/Or
author: Elif Batuman
name: Barry
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/21
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Vladimir 59536917 A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own...

“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.�

And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.

With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.]]> 256 Julia May Jonas 1529080444 Barry 3 3.56 2022 Vladimir
author: Julia May Jonas
name: Barry
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/14
date added: 2022/04/14
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
Julia May Jonas said 'gimme ten' and wrote the last 20 pages.
]]> Paradais 58730652 Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society - with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies - and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.]]> 118 Fernanda Melchor 1913097870 Barry 4 3.62 2021 Paradais
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Barry
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/11
date added: 2022/03/11
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Your Show 58519152
From Jamaica to Sheffield to the recently formed Premier League, Uri rises through the ranks as a referee, making it to the highest level of our national game.

But along the way he is confronted with tensions and prejudices, old and new, which emerge as his every move is watched, analysed and commented on.

Your Show is the thrilling story of one man's pioneering efforts to make it, against the odds, to the very top of his profession and beyond.]]> 320 Ashley Hickson-Lovence 0571366791 Barry 2 3.78 2022 Your Show
author: Ashley Hickson-Lovence
name: Barry
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/08
date added: 2022/03/09
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> The Raptures 53404189
It is late June in Ballylack. Hannah Adger anticipates eight long weeks' reprieve from school, but when her classmate Ross succumbs to a violent and mysterious illness, it marks the beginning of a summer like no other.

As others fall ill, questions about what - or who - is responsible pitch the village into conflict and fearful disarray. Hannah, ever the outsider, is haunted by guilt as she remains healthy while her friends are struck down. Isolated and afraid, she prays for help. What happens next will force her to question everything she believes.

Bursting with Carson's trademark wit, profound empathy and soaring imagination, The Raptures explores how tragedy can unite a small community - and tear it apart. At its heart is the extraordinary resilience of one young girl. As the world crumbles around her, she must find the courage to be different in a place where conforming feels like the only option available.]]> 336 Jan Carson 0857525751 Barry 3 3.91 2022 The Raptures
author: Jan Carson
name: Barry
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/20
date added: 2022/01/31
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> Parallel Hells 59449915 Some say that hell is other people and some say hell is loneliness...

In the thirteen darkly audacious stories of Parallel Hells we meet a golem, made of clay, learning that its powers far exceed its Creator's expectations; a ruined mansion that grants the secret wishes of a group of revellers; and a notorious murderer who discovers her Viking husband is not what he seems.

Asta is an ancient being who feasts on the shame of contemporary Londoners, who now, beyond anything, wishes only to fit in with a group of friends they will long outlive. An Oxford historian, in bitter competition with the rest of her faculty members, discovers an ancient tome whose sinister contents might solve her problems. Livia orchestrates a Satanic mass to distract herself from a recently remembered trauma and two lovers must resolve their differences in order to defy a lethal curse.

In this deliciously strange debut collection, Leon Craig draws on folklore and gothic horror in refreshingly inventive ways to explore queer identity, love, power and the complicated nature of being human.]]> 211 Leon Craig 1529371422 Barry 3 3.26 2022 Parallel Hells
author: Leon Craig
name: Barry
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/27
date added: 2022/01/31
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis]]> 59227335 Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors.

With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.]]> 284 Grace E. Lavery 1914198042 Barry 3 3.67 2022 Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
author: Grace E. Lavery
name: Barry
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/25
date added: 2022/01/25
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
come for the blissfully brash exploration of transness, stay for the QI porn parody.
]]> Fuccboi 58078525
Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves—cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer—he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery—being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes—that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?

Written in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.]]> 343 Sean Thor Conroe 0316394815 Barry 4 3.05 2022 Fuccboi
author: Sean Thor Conroe
name: Barry
average rating: 3.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/08
date added: 2022/01/09
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2022
review:
i think it's great and that's all that matters
]]> Small Things Like These 56943582
Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.]]> 116 Claire Keegan 0571368689 Barry 4 4.21 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Barry
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/07
date added: 2021/10/10
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> Disappearing Act 58706863
In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles.

Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters� streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.

Dark, provocative and often humorous, the collection will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.]]> 272 Robert Sheehan 0717189708 Barry 1 utter rubbish. 3.22 2022 Disappearing Act
author: Robert Sheehan
name: Barry
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2021/10/05
date added: 2021/10/06
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:
utter rubbish.
]]> The Lincoln Highway 56567207
Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own - to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. However, as soon as they've loaded Emmett's bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him.

Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy's plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome.

Bursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller.]]> 592 Amor Towles 1786332523 Barry 1 oof. 4.18 2021 The Lincoln Highway
author: Amor Towles
name: Barry
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2021/10/01
date added: 2021/10/04
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:
oof.
]]> I Wished 56931505 “I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.�

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.� In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.]]> 136 Dennis Cooper 1641293047 Barry 3
I interviewed Dennis Cooper about this book over at .]]> 3.97 2021 I Wished
author: Dennis Cooper
name: Barry
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/09/15
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:
a satisfying coda to the George Miles cycle, twenty years later. Cooper truly at his most vulnerable here.

I interviewed Dennis Cooper about this book over at .
]]> Cloud Cuckoo Land 58187218 From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story.

The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are trying to figure out the world around them: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for an exoplanet, decades from now. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril.

An ancient text—the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky—provides solace and mystery to these unforgettable characters. Doerr has created a tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us and those who will be here after we’re gone.

Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,� Cloud Cuckoo Land is a hauntingly beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.]]> 622 Anthony Doerr 0008478295 Barry 3 4.23 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Barry
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/09
date added: 2021/09/09
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> pandemonium 55048720 96 Andrew McMillan 1787333191 Barry 4 4.21 pandemonium
author: Andrew McMillan
name: Barry
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/16
date added: 2021/08/16
shelves: 21st-century, poetry, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> A Calling for Charlie Barnes 56313458 Joshua Ferris's new novel is both a profoundly tender and brutally funny portrayal of a life lost in the American dream.]]> 0 Joshua Ferris 0241202868 Barry 3 3.77 2021 A Calling for Charlie Barnes
author: Joshua Ferris
name: Barry
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/02
date added: 2021/08/03
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> Homo Irrealis 54531126 Homo Irrealis André Aciman explores what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was?but could in theory still happen.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.]]> 256 André Aciman 0571366457 Barry 0 3.87 2021 Homo Irrealis
author: André Aciman
name: Barry
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2020/11/25
date added: 2021/07/22
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 Barry 0 4.55 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
author: George Saunders
name: Barry
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2020/12/28
date added: 2021/07/22
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? 52895044 A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven children raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year-old Séamas O'Reilly and his ten siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow O'Reilly and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together. Along the way, we see O'Reilly through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time O'Reilly worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the president of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired O'Reilly regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.]]> 320 Séamas O'Reilly 0708899226 Barry 2 4.12 2021 Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?
author: Séamas O'Reilly
name: Barry
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/15
date added: 2021/07/19
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> Intimacies 50899732 Intimacies exquisitely charts the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world. From a Belfast student ordering illegal drugs online to end an unwanted pregnancy to a young mother's brush with mortality; from a Christmas Eve walking the city centre streets when everything seems possible, to a night flight from Canada which could change a life irrevocably, these are stories of love, loss and exile, of new beginnings and lives lived away from 'home'.

Taking in, too, the lives of other women who could be guiding lights - from Monica Lewinsky to Caroline Norton to Sinéad O'Connor - Intimacies offers keenly felt and subtly revealing insights into the heartbreak and hope of modern life.]]> 158 Lucy Caldwell 0571353746 Barry 3 3.94 2020 Intimacies
author: Lucy Caldwell
name: Barry
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/15
date added: 2021/05/16
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> Line 57513458 184 Niall Bourke 1916291422 Barry 2 3.87 2020 Line
author: Niall Bourke
name: Barry
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/04/05
date added: 2021/04/06
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows]]> 56160769 224 Sophie White 1916291465 Barry 3 4.07 2021 Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows
author: Sophie White
name: Barry
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/11
date added: 2021/03/11
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> Life Sentences 53239408 Life Sentences is the unforgettable journey of a family hungry for redemption, and determined against all odds to be free.

This sweeping story of one family's fight for survival goes on making the heart lurch long after the final page, and confirms Billy O'Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.]]> 240 Billy O'Callaghan 1787332446 Barry 2 4.14 2021 Life Sentences
author: Billy O'Callaghan
name: Barry
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/01/20
date added: 2021/01/21
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2021
review:

]]> No One Is Talking About This 55881555
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.]]> 210 Patricia Lockwood 1526629763 Barry 4 the great Twitter novel. 3.35 2021 No One Is Talking About This
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Barry
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/11
date added: 2020/11/14
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
the great Twitter novel.
]]> Look Again 55817204
Now in his eighties, he looks back on an outrageously eventful life. Born into an East End family, his dyslexia saw him written off as stupid at school. He hit a low point working as a debt collector until he discovered a passion for photography that would change everything. The working-class boy became an influential artist. Along the way he became friends with Mick Jagger, hung out with the Krays, got into bed with Andy Warhol and made the Queen laugh.

His love-life was never dull. He propelled girlfriend Jean Shrimpton to stardom, while her angry father threatened to shoot him. He married Catherine Deneuve a month after meeting her. Penelope Tree’s mother was unimpressed when he turned up on her doorstep. ‘It could be worse, I could be a Rolling Stone,� Bailey told her. He went on to marry Marie Helvin and then Catherine Dyer, with whom he has three children.

He is also a film and documentary director, has shot numerous commercials and has never stopped working. A born storyteller, his autobiography is a memorable romp through an extraordinary career.]]> 384 David Bailey 1509896821 Barry 4 3.73 2020 Look Again
author: David Bailey
name: Barry
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/10
date added: 2020/11/06
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> You Exist Too Much 55853881
Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people.

Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings: for love, and a place to call home.]]> 260 Zaina Arafat Barry 2 3.42 2020 You Exist Too Much
author: Zaina Arafat
name: Barry
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2020/11/06
date added: 2020/11/06
shelves: read-in-2020, read-for-review, 21st-century
review:

]]> Home Stretch 53812015 368 Graham Norton 1473665183 Barry 3 4.08 2020 Home Stretch
author: Graham Norton
name: Barry
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/30
date added: 2020/09/30
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Ghosts 50042494
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]> 352 Dolly Alderton 0241434548 Barry 2 3.86 2020 Ghosts
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Barry
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2020/09/27
date added: 2020/09/27
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> The First Woman 48734888
"Smart, headstrong, and flawed, Kirabo is raised by doting grandparents in idyllic Natteria in rural Uganda. But as she enters her teens, she starts to feel overshadowed by the absence of the mother she has never known. At once epic and deeply personal, it tells the story of one young girl's search for her mother, her discovery of what it means to be a woman throughout history and the implications of her future."

The book is billed as the companion to her acclaimed debut, Kintu.]]> 438 Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi 1786077884 Barry 4 4.17 2020 The First Woman
author: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
name: Barry
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/09
date added: 2020/09/12
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Real Life 51132850
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.]]> 327 Brandon Taylor Barry 4 3.90 2020 Real Life
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Barry
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/29
date added: 2020/09/03
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
Read my thoughts in the Irish Times:
]]> Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4) 52842705 is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet.

In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.

This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?

Summer.]]> 384 Ali Smith 0241207061 Barry 4 4.05 2020 Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)
author: Ali Smith
name: Barry
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/01
date added: 2020/09/03
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
Read my thoughts in the Irish Times:
]]> Who They Was 52813345
This life is like being in an ocean. Some people keep swimming towards the bottom. Some people touch the bottom with one foot, or even both, and then push themselves off it to get back up to the top, where you can breathe. Others get to the bottom and decide they want to stay there. I don’t want to get to the bottom because I’m already drowning.

This is a story of a London you won’t find in any guidebooks.

This is a story about what it’s like to exist in the moment, about boys too eager to become men, growing up in the hidden war zones of big cities � and the girls trying to make it their own way.

This is a story of reputations made and lost, of violence and vengeance � and never counting the cost.

This is a story of concrete towers and blank eyed windows, of endless nights in police stations and prison cells, of brotherhood and betrayal.

This is about the boredom, the rush, the despair, the fear and the hope.

This is about what’s left behind.]]> 336 Gabriel Krauze 0008374996 Barry 4 3.92 2020 Who They Was
author: Gabriel Krauze
name: Barry
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/30
date added: 2020/08/30
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Burnt Sugar 54745412
Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter. Is Tara’s memory loss real? Are Antara’s memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Tibor Jones South Asia Prize–winning writer Avni Doshi tells a story, at once shocking and empathetic, about love and betrayal between a mother and a daughter. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is a stunning and unforgettable debut.]]> 234 Avni Doshi Barry 3 3.35 2019 Burnt Sugar
author: Avni Doshi
name: Barry
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/27
date added: 2020/08/27
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> The Appointment 54429868
Or can you? With Dr. Seligman’s help, our narrator will find out.

In a monologue that is both deliciously dark and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from Hitler-centered sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the notion that anatomical changes can serve as historical reparation. The Appointment is an audacious debut novel by an explosive new international literary voice, challenging all of our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed, and the myriad ways we seek to make peace with others and ourselves in the 21st century.]]> 112 Katharina Volckmer 1913097323 Barry 3 3.79 2020 The Appointment
author: Katharina Volckmer
name: Barry
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/07/11
date added: 2020/08/22
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> The Shadow King 54280274 Ethiopia. 1935.

With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilize his strongest men before the Italians invade.

Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy's most vicious officers?

The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.]]> 448 Maaza Mengiste 1838851178 Barry 2 3.55 2019 The Shadow King
author: Maaza Mengiste
name: Barry
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2020/08/20
date added: 2020/08/21
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Shuggie Bain 50684054 A heart-wrenchingly moving novel set in Glasgow during the Thatcher years, Shuggie Bain tells the story of a boy's doomed attempt to save his proud, alcoholic mother from her addiction.

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and as she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different, he is clearly no� right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. For readers of Hanya Yanagihara, Emma Donoghue, Alan Hollinghurst and Frank McCourt, it is a heartbreaking novel by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.]]> 430 Douglas Stuart 1529019273 Barry 3 4.37 2020 Shuggie Bain
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Barry
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/11
date added: 2020/08/11
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> Death in her Hands 52544224 From one of our most provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense

While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.

Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone, and new to this area, having moved here from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession, as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But is there either a more innocent explanation for all this, or a much more sinister one � one that strikes closer to home?

In this triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, we must decide whether the stories we tell ourselves guide us closer to the truth or keep us further from it.]]> 272 Ottessa Moshfegh 1787332209 Barry 2 3.26 2020 Death in her Hands
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Barry
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2020/03/24
date added: 2020/07/29
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> The Pull of the Stars 53343065 Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds. ]]> 295 Emma Donoghue 1529046157 Barry 4 4.08 2020 The Pull of the Stars
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Barry
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/15
date added: 2020/07/28
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
Read my thoughts in the Irish Times: ?
]]> If I Had Your Face 52379349 If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerizing world of contemporary Seoul - a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret 'room salons' to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession, and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.

Navigating this hyper-competitive city are four young women balancing on the razor-edge of survival: Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive 'room salon' is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client; her flatmate Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite; Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy; and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.

A glitteringly dark and unsettling debut novel about four young women struggling to survive in South Korea.]]> 274 Frances Cha 0241396077 Barry 3 3.75 2020 If I Had Your Face
author: Frances Cha
name: Barry
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/03/26
date added: 2020/07/18
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
My review of If I Had Your Face is available to read on the Irish Times:
]]> Minor Detail 52045757 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba � the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people � and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail� of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 144 Adania Shibli 191309717X Barry 4 4.26 2017 Minor Detail
author: Adania Shibli
name: Barry
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/09
date added: 2020/05/08
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
During the forced occupation of Palestine by Israeli forces in 1948, a young Palestinian woman is raped, killed, and buried by soldiers in the Negev desert. Decades later, a Palestinian writer risks her life trying to obtain more information about this ‘minor detail� in the wider history of an atrocity. These two narratives are melded together in Adania Shibli’s stunningly scrupulous novel, Minor Detail. Despite being a mere 112 pages, Shibli worked the best part of a decade to hone her novel down to a political narrative so sharp and so streamlined that not a single word seems out of place. The result is a novel that should be heralded as not only a masterpiece, but as a landmark in political fiction. Shibli is surely a shoo-in for the Nobel.
]]> The Discomfort of Evening 49374086 I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough ... and I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'

Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison's striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty. Studded with unforgettable images - visceral, raw, surreal - The Discomfort of the Evening is a radical reading experience that will leave you changed forever.]]> 282 Lucas Rijneveld 0571349366 Barry 3 3.37 2018 The Discomfort of Evening
author: Lucas Rijneveld
name: Barry
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2020/02/15
date added: 2020/03/24
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:
Read my full review of this on the Irish Times:
]]> Hurricane Season 51969760 New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian and Boston.com Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumours and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Fernanda Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Through the stories of Luismi, Norma, Brando and Munra, Fernanda Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or William Faulkner's greatest novels, HURRICANE SEASON takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence - real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around. Written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, HURRICANE SEASON, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes.]]> 229 Fernanda Melchor 1913097099 Barry 4

Fernanda Melchor’s first novel to appear in English is an insane wall of text, a phalanx of prose rallied between the margins with strict orders to destroy the reader. Hurricane Season is the story of the Witch and her power over the inhabitants of the Mexican village of La Matosa. Melchor’s extremely graphic prose throughout would have Georges Bataille himself reaching for a crucifix but it is a commendation of translator Sophie Hughes that the novel never reads like cheap smut. It is often beautiful, often harrowing, and deeply affecting while . Almost instantly hailed as a modern classic of Mexican literature upon its publication, Hurricane Season can finally unleash its torrent upon English-language readers. Quite the apt title.]]> 4.08 2017 Hurricane Season
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Barry
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/31
date added: 2020/03/01
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:


Fernanda Melchor’s first novel to appear in English is an insane wall of text, a phalanx of prose rallied between the margins with strict orders to destroy the reader. Hurricane Season is the story of the Witch and her power over the inhabitants of the Mexican village of La Matosa. Melchor’s extremely graphic prose throughout would have Georges Bataille himself reaching for a crucifix but it is a commendation of translator Sophie Hughes that the novel never reads like cheap smut. It is often beautiful, often harrowing, and deeply affecting while . Almost instantly hailed as a modern classic of Mexican literature upon its publication, Hurricane Season can finally unleash its torrent upon English-language readers. Quite the apt title.
]]> Low 45213707
When Ullis discovers that his wife Aki has committed suicide, he escapes to Bombay with a bag of drugs for one final party. On the plane, he finds himself sitting by a glamorous society lady called Payal, and a friendship of sorts blooms into life. Over the coming days they embark on a whirlwind of self-destructive misadventures as Ullis attempts to mask his grief through excessive narcotics, resulting in episodes of increasing dysfunctionality that flirt with total self-obliteration - and perhaps a kind of resolution.]]> 320 Jeet Thayil 0571356419 Barry 2 3.35 2020 Low
author: Jeet Thayil
name: Barry
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2020/01/06
date added: 2020/01/06
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2020
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Find Me (Call Me By Your Name, #2)]]> 44573147 Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the world of one of our greatest contemporary romances to show us that in fact true love never dies.]]> 256 André Aciman 0571356494 Barry 4 Find Me can be read on the Irish Times here: ]]> 3.11 2019 Find Me (Call Me By Your Name, #2)
author: André Aciman
name: Barry
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/31
date added: 2019/12/09
shelves: 21st-century, read-for-review, read-in-2019
review:
My review of Find Me can be read on the Irish Times here:
]]> I Am Sovereign 43262079
When Wang Shu and her daughter Ying Yue view the house, Wang Shu is mysteriously struck by a falling oyster shell � the first in a series of seemingly innocuous events distort the reality of the characters� lives and cause them to question their very existence.

As religious epiphanies bump up against declarations of love, the characters begin to sabotage the fictional world they inhabit, causing our entire understanding of the book � and of the boundaries between fiction and real life � to be radically upended.]]> 209 Nicola Barker 1785152262 Barry 4 , my review in the Irish Times.]]> 3.50 2019 I Am Sovereign
author: Nicola Barker
name: Barry
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/30
date added: 2019/08/23
shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2019, read-for-review
review:
, my review in the Irish Times.
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