As well as exposing the continued ill-treatment and oppression of people from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, the Black Lives Matter movement also served as a reminder – to me and countless others – of the huge range of black-authored literature which is often overlooked by white readers and critics alike. Various websites and booksellers published lists of must-read BAME authors, and I was certainly glad to be pointed in the direction of a number of great books (both non-fiction and fiction), some of which I’d not even heard of, let alone read. Continue reading “Racial passing”
Category: 21st century fiction
Food and grief
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet imagines the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, and the death of their son Hamnet. Continue reading “Food and grief”
The modern American male
Following on from my last post on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge , I’m staying on the other side of the Atlantic for this one too: The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris. Continue reading “The modern American male”
Olive Kitteridge: We are all starving
The novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, presents a picture of life in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. It has an unconventional structure for a novel: instead of a plot that develops in the course of the novel, with a climax and resolution, it is structured as 13 separate, but interrelated short stories. Continue reading “Olive Kitteridge: We are all starving”