How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins?
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra that meditates on reality and questions of human existence. It’s a big question for a big book. A Zen priest as well as a teacher, writer, and filmmaker, Ozeki tackles her subject on a series of meta-levels, which make this 500-pager fascinatingly complex, if also at times a bit overwhelming.
It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for time alone with Frances, an attractive young widow who’s just moved back into town.
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or approximating a great moment in history and its aftermath, as the reader is still living through it. This could be trite, but Hall manages to make it compelling, tragic, and still sensitive in its handling of a love story during a time of terrible social upheaval.
More than once, reading Colson Whitehead’s latest novel Harlem Shuffle, the brilliant Josh and Benny Safdie movie Uncut Gems from 2019 came to mind, which was unexpected. For one, Whitehead’s book takes place on the other side of Central Park, far uptown from the film’s downtown Diamond District setting. It also unfolds in a meticulously recreated 1960s era Harlem rather than the early 2010s.
Historical fiction – perhaps all fiction – presents its authors with the problem of how to convey contextual information that is external to the plot but necessary to the reader’s understanding of it.
Like any good writer, Claire-Louise Bennett loves lists. Lists are, after all, those moments when words, freed from grammar’s grip, can simply be themselves – do their own thing, show off, let loose.
Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma is certainly not an easy read. It describes, in short chapters, the obsessive and ultimately destructive power of an abusive relationship.
Mieko Kawakami sits firmly amongst the Japanese literati for her sharp and pensive depictions of life in contemporary Japan. Since the translation of Breasts and Eggs (2020), she has also become somewhat of an indie fiction icon in the UK, with her books receiving praise from Naoise Dolan, An Yu and Olivia Sudjic.
For a slim book of some 100 pages, Batlava Lake by Adam Mars-Jones is deceptively meandering. The novella is narrated by Barry Ashton, an engineer attached to the British Army troops stationed with the peacekeeping forces during the Kosovo War. Barry admits to us that he is not good on the phone, or on paper, and he struggles putting things into words face to face.