I don’t know how she does it, but Elena Ferrante’s work is almost unique in how intensely immersive it is.
On one level, this is just a story of regular folks living regular lives. But once you get into it, you become drawn in so deeply that the line between your mind and that of Elena Greco, the narrator, almost vanishes. At times you feel as if you’re really there, experiencing these things, as if you’ve become Elena temporarily.
It’s an incredibly powerful and satisfying feeling, and as I say, pretty much unique in literature.
For the simple reason that it’s very, very funny, which is probably the hardest trick to pull off in books. Lots of them are funny in theory; this book is properly, laugh-out-loud funny throughout.
You probably need to have some familiarity with the character and TV show/shows, but that assumed, this is side-splitting stuff from start to end.
Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder - Alan Partridge - a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future. Gregarious and popular, yet Alan's never happier than when relaxing in his own five-bedroom, south-built house with three acres of land and access to a private stream. But who is this mysterious enigma?
Alan Gordon Partridge is the best - and best-loved - radio presenter in the region. Born into a changing world of rationing, Teddy Boys, apes in space and the launch of ITV, Alan's broadcasting career began as chief DJ of Radio Smile at St. Luke's Hospital…
Released earlier this year by the great Europa Press, this book is one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve ever read.
The story, set in near-future England, concerns a group of semi-aquatic beings, genetically related to humans but very different from us, physically and socially. Nobody knows where they come from, washed up eventually on the UK shore, but their presence causes fear, hostility, and, finally, tragedy and violence.
I described it to someone in an email as being like JG Ballard and William Gibson had a baby; I actually don't know how I'd even review Lambda; it's that much of a one-off. Definitely one of those books that'll be appearing periodically in dreams and daydreams for the rest of my life.
Whoever the lambdas might be, and wherever they really come from, they’re already here among us.
Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. The government has noticed them. So has a whole gamut of extremist groups. Cara Gray has noticed them too, first as a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then as the impossibly shifting target of her work as a police officer.
When a bomb goes off at a school, Cara finds herself the weak point in a surveillance regime that has failed to prevent the worst terrorist atrocity in decades. A…
After months of bullying and romantic heartbreak, seventeen-year-old Aidan Flood feels about ready to end it all. But when he wakes one morning to find that local beauty Sláine McAuley actually has, he discovers a new sense of purpose and becomes determined to find out what happened to her. The town is happy to put it down to suicide, but one night Aidan gets a message scratched in ice on his bedroom window: ‘I didn’t kill myself.’
Who is contacting him? And if Sláine didn’t end her own life…who did?
Now Aidan must hunt Sláine’s killers and unravel the darker secrets surrounding the town. And he’s about to find out that in matters of life and death, salvation often comes in the unlikeliest of forms.
