The paperback of this big bestseller was published last week. I had bought the hardback for myself when it was first published, so this blogtour provided the impetus to rescue it from being buried in my TBR piles. It begins with a harrowing scenario. Isaac Addy stands on a bridge, unsure whether to jump or Read More
Tag: Tragicomedy
“If a loving yuh looking for yuh buck upon the right one”
Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo. This novel has gone straight into my shortlist of books of the year – I loved every single page. It is both hilariously funny yet compassionate and bittersweet, and eminently quotable. Meet sharp-suited seventy-four year old Barrington Jedidiah Walker, who emigrated from Antigua in the 1960s and has lived in Hackney Read More
An experiment in greed
This is my second post for Simon’s tribute to his late Gran – Greene for Gran. Last week I reviewed England Made Me, an early novel from 1935, which I hadn’t read before. This week, my second is Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, one of his later books published in 1980, a Read More
“Let all the children boogie”
One of my daughter’s favourite programmes from the noughties was My Parents are Aliens which ran on Children’s ITV from 1999-2006. In it a pair of marooned Valuxians morph into humans and adopt three orphaned children in an attempt to fit in, and experience many funny things as they learn what it is to be human. Read More
Family in crisis! Will quirkiness pull them through?
The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno My first encounter with US novelist Joe Meno, The Great Perhaps is a tale of a dysfunctional American family. An academic couple and their two daughters, they are four very different characters… Let’s meet the Casper family: Father – Jonathan, who has epilepsy provoked by seeing clouds, and is searching for Read More
A Disintegrating Life in Letters
The Cry Of The Sloth by Sam Savage Savage, whose delightful and quirky first novel, Firmin: Adventures Of A Metropolitan Lowlife was published at the age of 67, has done it again with The Cry Of The Sloth, upping the quirk quotient considerably in this bizarrely funny, yet sad story. Subtitled, ‘The Mostly Tragic Story of Read More
