BOOKS

'The Heart's Invisible Furies,' by John Boyne, is a 700-page epic novel about the life of a gay man named Cyril Avery that also covers Ireland's social history in the second half of the twentieth century. The story is told in seven-year increments, beginning with the circumstances surrounding Cyril's birth in Dublin in August 1945 to an unmarried teenage mother, Catherine Goggin, and ending in 2015, when Ireland legalized same-sex marriage through a public vote. Cyril is adopted as a baby by novelist Maude Avery and her banker husband Charles, who constantly reminds Cyril that he is "not a real Avery," depriving him of genuine affection. Cyril has an unrequited crush on his best friend, Julian Woodbead, throughout his adolescence and beyond, and this experience shapes the rest of his life as he struggles to be honest with others and with himself. XEM THÊM :  Nhất Lộc ⚡️ Game bài đổi thưởng ăn tiền thật Cyril unknowingly crosses paths with his biological m

  The last ten months or so have been extremely difficult for the publishing industry in general, and especially difficult for small indie presses that have managed to bring brilliant new books into the world despite a pandemic. Exit Management by Naomi Booth , published by Dead Ink Books last summer, is one of them. Lauren, who is originally from the north of England, works as a graduate HR executive at a City firm and specializes in "exit management," also known as firing people in less formal terms. She is very ambitious about moving up the property ladder, even in a city where a bedsit in Deptford is always advertised as a "luxury studio in outer Greenwich." Callum is a young man in his twenties who lives in Croydon with his parents and gets a job at GuestHouse, a company that finds elite temporary residences in London for the super-rich. Callum develops a close relationship with one of his clients, József, a terminally ill elderly man who came to England as a r

After a long period of reading novels or nonfiction, I've recently been reading short story collections, possibly as a result of my slightly shorter attention span in recent weeks. I discovered Treats by Lara Williams in a charity shop shortly after reading the author's debut novel Supper Club, which was released last summer. This very short collection - 21 stories in just over 100 pages - published in 2016 by the now-defunct Freight Books contains more of the same sharply observed prose about modern life, usually from the viewpoint of characters in their millennial years. As a result, Williams excels at demonstrating how reality does not always match expectations, whether it's graduate job hunting, post-university relationships, or creative writing classes. Her stories in the second person are also very effective - a difficult perspective to master. Overall, this is a vibrant contemporary collection written by a compelling new voice. XEM THÊM :  SU500 – Game Đánh Bài Chất

The first chapter of Belinda Bauer's 'Snap' presents a terrifying premise based on the unsolved murder of Marie Wilks. On a hot summer day in 1998, eleven-year-old Jack Bright is left in a broken-down car by the side of a highway with his two younger sisters, Joy and Merry, while their pregnant mother, Eileen, seeks assistance. She never returns, and her body is discovered stabbed to death. Three years later, after being abandoned by their father, who is unable to cope, Jack resorts to burgling houses in order to provide for his sisters while avoiding detection by social services. On the other side of town, Catherine While, a young pregnant woman, discovers a knife next to her bed with a note that reads "I could have killed you," but she chooses not to tell her husband or report the break-in to the police. Elsewhere, DS Reynolds, who follows the rules, and DCI Marvel, who takes a slightly more unconventional approach to detective work, are investigating multiple b

  I consider myself a fast reader, but it is unusual for me to read an entire book in one Sunday, as I did with 'Rubbernecker' by Belinda Bauer, which won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival's Novel of the Year award in 2014. The story begins with an account of how Sam Galen ended up in a coma after a car accident, as well as his experiences in a high-dependency neurological ward under the care of Tracy Evans, a selfish nurse attempting to charm one of the other patients' wealthy husbands. Meanwhile, Patrick Fort, a Cardiff University anatomy student, discovers that the body he is dissecting did not die from the causes listed on the death certificate. These various plot lines become intently connected with one another. Patrick has Asperger's syndrome, and his portrayal will unavoidably draw comparisons to Christopher Boone from Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.' Patrick, like Christopher, approaches mysterie

Sebastian Barry's 'Days Without End' tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a young Irishman who emigrated to Canada and later the United States in the mid-nineteenth century after his family died in the Great Famine. When they are teenagers, he befriends and falls in love with John Cole, and they work at a parlor where they dress as women and dance for miners. They later enlist in the US army and fight in two wars before adopting an abandoned Indian Sioux girl named Winona. Sebastian Barry is a new author to me, and I didn't realize until after I finished 'Days Without End' that his previous novels, two of which have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, also feature other McNulty family members from different generations. Despite the fact that the books are interconnected rather than a series, 'Days Without End' reads well as a separate novel. It is a lyrical western, as opposed to the more typically harsh works of the genre. The landscape is beautifull