The music world of the 60s and 70s seems to be having a literary renaissance at the moment. Recently we have had David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue and Taylor Jenkins Read’s Daisy Jones and the Six. Much like those books, Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, is about a band that burned brightly…
After having done giant robot on robot action in his Themis Files trilogy, Sylvain Neuvel embarks on something a little different in his new book A History of What Comes Next. Set between the dying days of the Second World War and the launch of the first man into space, this is not so much…
Inga Vesper’s debut crime novel The Long, Long Afternoon takes readers into the Stepford world of 1950s Los Angeles and then blows it up from the inside. When the book opens, seemingly devoted housewife Joyce Hayney has disappeared. The investigation into that disappearance will reveal cracks in the façade of her marriage and the community…
Jack Beaumont is not the real name of the author of The Frenchman, a book that itself is full of pseudonyms, nicknames and operational code names. Beaumont was, apparently, a member of the French secret service after a career as a pilot and has, since retiring, moved to Australia. Following in the footsteps of authors…
Cassandra Austin’s debut All Fall Down was a sometimes dreamlike Australian gothic tale set in a rural country town. While it is at times a little more grounded, her latest book Like Mother, finds Austin in similar territory. An Australian country town in the late 1960s in the middle of a heatwave and a set…
Emma Stonex’s debut novel The Lamplighters is based loosely on the true story of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a remote lighthouse in 1900. Stonex relocates the event to a more recent time and a slightly different location but maintains the mystery and the mythology that surrounds those who spent their lives to…
Polish author Kaja Malanowska wrote her third novel Fog (translated by Bill Johnson) as an experiment in attracting a broader readership through the crime genre. Her previous two novels, the autobiographical Drobne szaleństwa dnia codziennego (Small Madnesses of Everyday Life) in 2010, and Patrz na mnie, Klaro! (Look at Me, Klara!) in 2012 were literary…
Klara and the Sun is the first novel from Kazuo Ishiguro since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and his 2015 novel, the Arthurian-inspired The Buried Giant. While delivery a very different main character and sketching in the outlines of a unique future world, Klara and the Sun is thematically consistent with much…
Lara Thomson’s debut One Night, New York, opens at the top of the Empire State Building in the height of the depression. Two women, Frances and Agnes wait up there, planning to push someone over the edge. In returning to this setup, Thompson will range across the highs and lows of New York City in…
In the introduction to Nick, Michael Farris-Smith talks about his relationship with its “source material”, the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby. That relationship shifted over the years and his response to that novel changed as he grew and changed. As this happened the character who he found himself most fascinated with was…
