The slow death of Hanahaki disease is meant to be a manifestation of the overwhelm of love, a progression of the colloquial language that we have, for decades, been building to describe this indescribable feeling. Lovesick. Butterflies in your stomach. All of that. It’s not pleasant language. It’s not supposed to be.
Sitting between 150 and 200 pages (depending on the edition) with fourteen essays, Dinner on Monster Island does not overstay its welcome.
The Leftover Woman embraces a range of topics with great emotional weight, including motherhood, adoption, abuse, and the hostility of the United States to undocumented immigrants, all of which together do make a reader truly hope for a kind resolution…
Even though Whereabouts validated my pessimism around the impact of these diasporas in recent works of Indian fiction, Ghosh’s Gun Island, in an intrinsically antonymous manner, enthralled me with adoration for works set in India.
American literature is littered with writers aping Hemingway, but instead of creating a purposeful and precise piece, they compile a redundant series of descriptions and lifeless imagery that hardly achieve anything. Marianne Micros’ prose is not following in that tradition but despite the wealth of ideas, in its simplicity, it lacks personality or a distinct voice.
Since the publication of her award-winning 2020 novel Hamnet, Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell’s next book has been eagerly awaited. The Marriage Portrait came out in August, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and was recently shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize in fiction. However, I came away from The Marriage Portrait deeply dissatisfied. It is a beautifully written book, but many of the choices end up dramatically undercutting its own story and themes.
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