Category: Fiction

‘Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ – Steven Greenblatt Golden hair, wistful daydreams, and a name enduring generations, Hamnet details the life of a boy and his family: his twin Judith, a sister Susanna, his mother Agnes, and his father…

A mother drowning in guilt, a family torn apart by grief, and a stranded car in the wake of a New England hurricane set the stage for Walker’s suspenseful novel. Don’t Look For Me provides the perfect balance of mystery and suspense without being too graphic or terrifying. After a tragic accident tore her family apart, Molly Clarke…

First off, yes, the title is correct -this is the sequel to Ready Player One– and no, this will not include any spoilers for either of the novels. I read Ready Player One years ago and loved how Cline brought the culture of the 80s together with a modern-day underdog, technological fantasies, and a teenage love story. I got…

I would like to begin by acknowledging that I’m a few years late to the craze surrounding this book and my only excuse is my stubbornness about being a “band-wagoner”. Additionally, I had heard mixed, lackluster reviews from friends, which only cemented its position at the bottom of my TBR list. I’m thankful for my belated reading…

“what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?” After 300+ pages with Rooney’s characters, I’m honestly not sure how to answer those questions. How do you evaluate friendship when your perception is biased by your interpretation of communication? Do conversations you have with yourself even count? These are core elements explored through the life of Frances,…

I’ll be honest, my main interest in this book came when it won the 2020 Booker Prize and I was curious if it would live up to the hype. Suffice it to say, it did. In an oversimplification, this is a book about longing: longing to be accepted, longing for bigger and better, longing for normalcy, longing for…

(Translated by Eric Selland) If you had to erase one thing from the world to live an extra day, what would it be? This is the reality of the novel’s narrator as he’s faced with the opportunity to live just a little bit longer.  The narrator, who works as a postman and lives with his cat…

I struggle at times to identify the difference between the quality of a book and how I feel reading it, knowing that just because I might not like a topic does not discredit the content itself. The Four Winds epitomized this struggle for me as I try to decide whether or not I “like” a book that focuses…

“But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered.” I love the moment where a certain line makes you catch your breath and pause, taking the time to soak in the sentence. Ocean Vuong provides that experience consistently throughout On Earth We’re…

I first came across this title as part of a class assignment and, upon reading the synopsis, thought, “this is a British version of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”. Now that I’ve read the book, I firmly stand behind my initial hypothesis.  Cat, Lissa and Hannah live together in East London, brought into each other’s lives…