Marcus Sedgwick was one of my favourite writers as a teenager, so when I learned he’d written a book for adults, I was keen to check it out. A Love Like Blood retains many of the elements of his YA fiction – a Gothic feel, a historical setting, and elements of the supernatural – while delving into more adult themes such as desire, grief, and obsession. I thought it was a smart, literate, and gripping delve into a disturbing and violent underworld.
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Disgrace has become something of a contemporary classic since winning the Booker Prize in 1999. J.M. Coetzee’s searing novel of a man who’s lost his way in a changing South Africa was in 2006 named ‘the greatest novel of the last 25 years’ by The Observer, and made it onto BBC News’ list of the 100 most influential novels in 2019. It’s a short book, but Coetzee makes every word count as it builds to its shattering conclusion.
The genesis of Under the Pendulum Sun came from Jeanette Ng’s MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It was there she gained an interest in missionary theology, which forms the backbone of the novel, though it’s set in the Victorian era. Other influences include the Brontës, namely Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and Paradise Lost. This is to say that it’s a heady cocktail of the Gothic, religious, and fantastical. It has a very simple premise, which she used to pitch the novel: Victorian missionaries in fairyland.
Patrick Ness is best known as a writer for children and young people, but he’s also written two novels for adults: The Crash of Hennington and The Crane Wife. The Crane Wife was published in 2013, and is a loose retelling of a Japanese folktale of the same name. Ness relocates the story to contemporary London, making the protagonist a middle-aged divorcee who works in a printing shop (also, like Ness himself, an American in Britain). It’s something of an experiment, with mixed success, but still a lot to enjoy.
For a number of years, Stephen King wrote novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. As he stated in the introduction to The Bachman Books, this was done to see if his success was due to talent or luck (and so he could publish more than one book a year). He was outed as Bachman in 1985 by a bookstore clerk named Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between King’s and Bachman’s writing styles. In 1989 King published The Dark Half, which drew on his experiences writing under a pseudonym for a story about a writer whose psychopathic pen name comes to life.
Dempow Torishima’s Sisyphean is a book of four parts, each a separate story but contributing to a larger whole. It’s described as a ‘mosaic novel’, though it was published in its native Japan as a short story collection. I think ‘mosaic novel’ fits it better, because when put together the stories gain something they would otherwise lack as individual pieces. They’re linked by theme and setting – all take place in a distant future where genetic engineering has rendered the human race unrecognisable.
Miranda July was accomplished in other fields before she turned her hand to writing. I knew of her two films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2005) and The Future, before I read her books, but she is also a performance artist and singer. I read her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You in 2016 and while I was somewhat underwhelmed, I was intrigued by her unique style and voice. The First Bad Man is her debut novel, published in 2015, and I’m happy to report I liked it a lot more.
Wivenhoe is billed as a climate change novel, but it’s also a Brexit novel, and a pandemic novel in that it depicts a global event that fundamentally alters the way we live. It’s a slim volume, clocking in at just 150 pages, but packs a lot into that short length. It takes place over the course of a single day, following a murder that shocks the town’s inhabitants.
Richard Marsh’s The Beetle was a success when it was published in 1897. At one point it even outsold Dracula, which came out in the same year. However, unlike Dracula, it hasn’t remained as popular in the years since. This is a shame, because it’s a rich slice of late-Victorian Gothic fiction, with well-drawn characters, an exciting plot, and atmosphere in spades.
Children of Dune is the third book in the Dune series, but feels like more of a sequel than the second, Dune Messiah. Messiah was much smaller-scale than its predecessor, with comparatively less at stake (the fate of Paul Atreides vs the fate of the Fremen, Arrakis, and the Empire in Dune). Children, on the other hand, has the same kind of epic scale as the first book, with the planet and the future of the universe once again under threat.
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Atticus Book ReviewsBook reviews and reading recommendations written by volunteers and friends of the shop! |
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