“Brooding and brilliant All the Birds, Singing, is a big, deep and accomplished novel that I would press into the hands of any lover of words, and stories. She excels at creating character, a sense of place and a thrilling tension, infusing every page with a depth of feeling along the way. For a novelist as…
Posted on 19th June 2014
Posted on 28th May 2012
Glister
John Burnside’s soaring reputation as a poet and memoirist often overshadows his parallel career as a writer of dark and unsettling novels. Glister, his seventh, has as its backdrop the sort of isolated, left-behind provincial town Burnside has explored before in The Dumb House and The Mercy Boys. The town here has only two districts,…
Posted on 1st February 2012
Fiction Uncovered by…Rachael Beale, web manager for the London Review of Books
Kevin Brockmeier – The Illumination A Pulitzer for Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in 2009; the National Book Award for A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in 2010; generous praise for Katie Ward’s Girl Reading, David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and many more – even as prejudice against the short…