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.
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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.
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Atticus Book ReviewsBook reviews and reading recommendations written by volunteers and friends of the shop! |
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