In 1980s Nigeria, a young married woman, Yejide, tries and fails to become pregnant. It’s a time of political upheaval: over the course of the novel, several coups take place. It’s also a time during which modern (Western) medical practice enjoys an ongoing conflict with traditional remedies, as well as pseudo- or quasi-Christian practices in Southern Nigeria, where the novel takes place. The protagonist’s mother-in-law sends her to a “prophet” in an attempt to remedy her apparent infertility; when she eventually conceives and gives birth, only to have the child die in infancy, the mother-in-law openly suspects it of being abiku, an evil spirit.
Continue reading Stay With Me
Not long after World War Two, a pair of teenage Jewish Londoners, brother and sister, are diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a treatment centre in the Kent countryside. Once the exclusive domain of the wealthier classes, the advent of the NHS has opened up the world of sanatoriums to the poor, and not all of the patients are happy about it.
Continue reading The Dark Circle
Anne Tyler’s back doing what Anne Tylers do best: being a nicer, better, more experienced, less pointlessly antagonistic version of Jonathan Franzen. In A Spool of Blue Thread, she brings us another example of what I call the “family epic”: a novel tracing the history of a family – in this case, the Whitshank family, from the Depression up to the present day. Because it’s Tyler, these events take place in Baltimore.
Continue reading A Spool of Blue Thread
The pressure was on for our Donna. After her unputdownable debut, The Secret History, she sort of dropped off the radar, producing only one other (very disappointing) novel since 1992. This one was her comeback tour, and if your memory doesn’t stretch back to mid-last year, it was so hyped that it was almost impossible to imagine it living up to expectations. Continue reading The Goldfinch
