Patrick Ryan: Connecting lives
PATRICK RYAN’S CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts (2017) marked him out as a writer to watch. His stories brim with rounded often-unforgettable characters living quietly, with yearning, humanity and acceptance. He is a master of dialogue, the unsentimental and the subtle. So when his debut novel Buckeye arrived, I approached...
Breaking point
ONE DAY THE CHILDREN AND I came home to see Hamad sitting in front of the TV. ‘Why’re you home early?’ Haris asked. ‘To spend time with you,’ Hamad said, patting his lap so Haris could go and sit with him. He only had to look at me in silence and I understood what had...
Violence without motive: the caged ferocity of adolescence
ONCE I BECAME AN ADULT, I looked back and saw the teenager I had been: studious, insecure, wary of role models, unable to blend in. That young girl – with vain, golden ballet shoes on her feet – couldn’t understand her peers, and at every moment expected a sudden slap, a pocketknife pulled out, a...
(eventually) Embracing the sisterhood
I SENT MY FIRST MANUSCRIPT OUT in December 2003, when I was 14. It was a 100,000-word fantasy novel about dragons, and I explained to the lady behind the Post Office counter how I was going to be a published author. She was like, “Ooh, I’ll watch this space.” No agent, at all, wanted to...
Daria Lavelle: Savouring the beyond
A DELICIOUSLY ORIGINAL supernatural thriller that reads like it could be a script for a mesmerising Punchdrunk production, Daria Lavelle’s Aftertaste blends food and ghosts with romance and menace. It’s lively, it’s colourful, it’s funny. It’s a feast of a story, boasting engaging characters and a riveting plot. The novel’s beating heart is Kostya, who...
Brontë country
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents would walk me out into the wilds of England’s moorlands in a bright-coloured anorak, wellies that squelched. I didn’t like walking then; I was a sickly child with constant migraines, preferring to read books curled on the sofa. And so, dragged across the barrens with a blinding stick...
My mother’s war
DRIVING HER 2CV BACK TO PARIS through the gloomy forests of the Oise, Lucie imagined the dialogue at her trial:“Have you ever been a Nazi?”“Of course! I was a very happy Nazi.”“You really were a Nazi?”“Why not?”“Do you know, you are the very first person we have ever heard confess to it.”Lucie imagined the entire...
The dark side of the mirror
“One thing needs to be made clear. I did not kill my twin sister.” SO BEGINS LIANN ZHANG’s fiercely entertaining debut Julie Chan Is Dead. The novel charts the hair-raising fortunes of the eponymous narrator, an impoverished grocery store cashier, after she responds to an apparent cry for help from her estranged twin sister Chloe...
Welcome to the Green Zone
IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS EXPECTING STALINGRAD, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps uplit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down palm trees beside the Tigris...
Brouhaha in Baghdad
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO Nussaibah Younis, whose debut social and political satire has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, having already gathered a truckload of rapturous reviews including The Irish Times, Guardian and The Times, which describes Fundamentally as Bridget Jones in Iraq. This novel, a tale of a heartbroken English academic who...
A visit in my room
I HEARD A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, and quickly put my notebook under the mattress. I thought that lunch was over and that one of the orderlies had come to call me to the second part of the therapeutic conversations. But no: when I opened the door, Martin Amis was standing there. “May I come...
Stink, seduction and surrender
OUTSIDE, IN THE CITY, life begins early, between four and five in the morning. That’s usually when she goes to sleep, and she doesn’t stir until well into late morning, more like around noon. She’s getting on now, in her eighth decade. She shouldn’t really be here anymore – her type isn’t meant to survive...
