The Remnants, by Robert Hill
by Julian Anderson
“The novel is, at heart, a bittersweet love story about left-overs of many kinds, and once a reader trusts the strange terrain, it feels like our own.”
“The novel is, at heart, a bittersweet love story about left-overs of many kinds, and once a reader trusts the strange terrain, it feels like our own.”
“I have never encountered prose that renders this world so beautifully: the field ceases to be a language and series of figures we don’t understand and becomes a subject for which we have a nearly physical understanding.”
“Her stories know so much about the world—the small ways we betray the people we love and the horrors that are so outsized they’d be absurd if they weren’t crushing—yet Beasts & Children is never cynical or defeatist.”
“Barker creates her story, her vision of world events with emotional as well as factual depth, filing her fictional dispatches from well-researched historical moments in time.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews the most recent release from feminist press Shade Mountain Press.
“These are complex emotional states that capture the performance of intimacy and affection”: Heather Ryan on Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You.
“With her customary depth, compassion, and wit, Hadley explores the vexations of togetherness and separateness, the puzzle of core individual and family identity.”
“The novel’s primary storyline begins approximately where Mawer’s last novel, Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), left off. Marian, who in Trapeze parachuted into occupied France as an undercover agent, is now returning to England at the end of World War II.”
Jennifer Solheim on Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation: “Through Harun, Daoud explores both the ethics of Camus creating a nameless Arab character to kill on the beach as part of a philosophical exploration, and the horror of a pied noir being canonized for killing an Arab.”
“The events of 9/11 are integral to the novel’s structure and meaning, and to the Amendola family’s history and identity, but neither novel nor family are defined or constrained by the event.”
“Yet the author’s honesty leaves everything on the table through every page turned”: Brian Bartels on Matt Sumell’s new collection, Making Nice.
“History, personal or collective, weighs on everyone in these stories, sculpting their inner lives. And yet, Tabucchi suggests, an unlikely transcendence is possible.”
