Category: Reviews

Book review: Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

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Taiwan Travelogue coverSince its English translation was first published in 2024, Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has generated a lot of positive buzz in bookish circles. Lin King’s translation from Taiwanese Mandarin won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize. On top of all that, this book was recommended by Leah of Bristol’s Very Small Bookshop.

So I was disappointed to find that I didn’t love this novel. But it did grow on me, and the translation is undoubtedly astonishing.

Taiwan Travelogue is a complex layered study of language, colonial occupation and queer love. We are told this is a long-lost manuscript by Japanese novelist Aoyama Chizuko, translated into Chinese multiple times and now tidied up and released in full for the first time. The story is supposedly auto fiction based on Chizuko’s travel diary from 1938. Nested inside multiple forewords and afterwords is a first-person narrative, all with footnotes from both the fictional translator into Chinese and the real translator into English.

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Book review: The Coral Bones by E J Swift

Coral Bones book cover

Is it something in the water or have I stumbled on a new micro genre, Australian eco fiction? After the dark, thriller approach of Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, there was a tinge of sci-fi to The Coral Bones by E J Swift. And I loved both books

In the vein of, say, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Coral Bones has three interleaved narratives, all set in the same section of Australia’s coastline just under 200 years apart. In the present day, marine biologist Hana is doing all she can to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. In the early 19th century, 17-year-old Judith persuades her ship captain father to take her on a sea voyage. In the future, after massive climate and biodiversity catastrophes, Telma’s job is to track down rare animal sightings to help rebuild the world.

We meet Hana first. The novel opens with the discovery of a dead body on an island she’s visiting to help her friend and colleague Aaron with his research. The body, painted entirely white, is found on an inflatable painted with the words “This is what it looks like when coral dies.” Hana writes daily to her ex, Tess, switching between current events and musings on their relationship. She’s unhappy but believes her work is essential, painful as it is.

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Book review: Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen

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Freezing Point book coverThe first Danish book I read on holiday this summer was Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (translated from Danish by Joan Tate). But it’s taken me time to put together my thoughts about it.

This 1969 sci-fi novel begins in 1973. In this near future, a young man called Bruno is offered a radical new solution to inoperable cancer. He can choose to be cryogenically frozen until medical science is capable of curing him.

Bruno’s life before this point is a lonely one. He’s an editor of a literary magazine. His greatest asset is coming up with ideas for short stories, which he communicates to his roster of regular writers. He doesn’t have close family or friends. But he does have a strange growth on his neck.

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Book review: Vida by Marge Piercy

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Vida book coverEarly last year I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and loved it so much I bought two more of her books. But when I picked up her 1979 novel Vida, it took a while for me to get into. This was not a fault with the writing, the topic or the characters. It was simply too tense a read when I was a little stressed. It was only on the way home from holiday, and in the week that followed, that I was relaxed enough to let this story completely absorb me.

At the start of the book, it’s the end of the 1970s and Vida is a left-wing activist who has been on the run from the law for almost a decade. She is always on the move, changing her appearance and name, constantly weighing up the risks she is taking to be fed and sheltered.

She’s been separated from her husband Leigh for years, but is reluctant to accept that his girlfriend is the main woman in his life now, while Vida is the secret occasional liaison. Leigh is a talk show host at a small radio station, a minor celebrity living a safe, comfortable life.

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Book review: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

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Waist Deep book coverOn our holiday in Denmark, we found a bookshop with a decent selection of Danish books translated into English. In a surprise turn, I picked out a sci-fi novel (Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen) and Tim picked a literary novel: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (translated from Danish by Sherilynn Nicolette Hellberg).

A group of friends from university, 12 years after they first met, spend seven summer days in a lakeside cabin. It should be a lovely, relaxing time with their favourite people. But desires, anxieties and the realities of adult life are putting everyone under pressure. No-one is saying what they really think or feel.

Sylvia is our main point of view character. She’s a daydreamer, easily lost in her own thoughts and her version of reality. She’s also more than a little pretentious – she longs to be seen as artistic and insightful.

Gry is the mother hen – and the only literal mother in the group. She studies folklore, but worries that she is no longer taken seriously as an academic, or as a person beyond her role as a parent.

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Book review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

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Strangers on a Train book coverI’m a big fan of the Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train, which is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. And I have loved the other Highsmith books I’ve read. So this should have been my ideal read. But I must admit something about this book didn’t gel for me.

Perhaps it’s that the plot is quite different from the film, which I have watched many times. I certainly can’t fault Highsmith’s complex characters or chillingly believable depiction of criminal psychology.

The concept is simple. Two men meet on a train, each wishing (to greater or lesser extent) someone dead. Bruno suggests they swap murders – he will murder Guy’s estranged wife Miriam who won’t give him a divorce, while Guy can murder Bruno’s father who won’t pay him his trust fund. There would be nothing to link them to their crimes and they could time it so the obvious culprit is out of town. Guy laughs off the suggestion but two weeks later Miriam is murdered.

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Book review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore book coverSometimes a bookseller presses a book into your hands that you had never heard of and it is the most absolutely perfect read for you. Booksellers like that are a precious, precious thing.

During Independent Bookshop Week in June, the Very Small Bookshop in Bristol had a cool way to share book recommendations. Leah, who runs the shop, created six lucky dips under topics including “somewhat bizarre” and “gaaaaaaay”. You picked out a slip of paper with a title and author, and if you liked the sound of it enough to buy the book you got 15% off. I love a book recommendation from someone whose taste I trust/share – and the selection of books in Leah’s shop already vouched for that. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy was my pick from “soft or profound or lovely”. I certainly wouldn’t call it soft, but it’s very profound indeed.

This novel focuses on the Salt family – father Dominic and his three children – who live on an extremely remote sub-Antarctic island called Shearwater. Dominic is the island’s caretaker, a role that he chose after his wife died nine years ago. They live in an old lighthouse, no longer functional for that purpose but bringing with it more than a century of lonely histories. The extreme, harsh environment seems an appropriate setting for grief – perhaps one so extreme it can drive people mad.

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Book review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

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Big Swiss book coverI’m a fan of the Weirdos Book Club podcast with Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd, though I don’t always agree with their take on books. For instance, both hosts loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, which I found…meh. So when they heartily recommended Big Swiss by Jen Beagin I couldn’t be sure I would like it. But it’s a comedy about a relationship that starts at a dog park, so I at least knew dogs would feature heavily. And it would hopefully be a light read. I’d say it achieves those things. And I did like it, though I wouldn’t go so far as love.

Big Swiss is sort of a love story, but it’s more about sex than romance. It’s certainly not sweet or romantic. It satirises life in the rich New York town of Hudson. And it’s very funny.

Greta lives in a falling-apart old farmhouse with her friend Sabine, her dog Piñon and a few thousand bees. She works from home transcribing audio of the local sex therapist’s sessions. It’s all supposedly anonymised but in their small community she often recognises the voices of patients. Lately she has become obsessed with the sessions of a new patient she nicknames Big Swiss, a woman who she knows is tall and Swiss.

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Book review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

The Old Drift book coverI forget where I saw the recommendation to read The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. I suspect it was a listicle about African sci-fi. And indeed this book won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020. But I feel like calling it sci-fi is a bit misleading. This is an epic saga, incorporating some sci-fi elements in the last 20 years of its 125-year tale. With a touch of magical realism in the earlier part of the story. It’s also brilliant.

This is the story of three families in what is now Zambia. In 1904, on the banks of the Zambezi river, near Victoria Falls, a feverish British man, an Italian hotelier and a local African busboy become connected by what seems like a small incident. Percy Clarke is an archetypal colonist – a bored Englishman looking for adventure. He’s racist, often drunk and generally unpleasant. His is a disturbing mind to be inside.

Thankfully it is just a few pages before the narrative swiftly moves on to “The Grandmothers”. Serpell lays out the stories of three women connected to that moment in the prologue.

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Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

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Interstellar Megachef book coverI try to buy ebooks direct from publishers when I can. There are a few small publishers that are really good for this, such as Rebellion. When I go to their site for a particular book I almost always wind up buying a couple of random other books that just sound fun. Such as Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan – I mean, that’s quite the title, right?

A queer SF tale about an intergalactic cooking show, this sounded like it would be completely silly fluff. Which I was very much in the mood for when I bought it and when I decided to read it. But this is actually much better and less fluffy than I expected. Though it does have its sillier moments, and comedic ones too, this is largely a story about prejudice, migration, xenophobia and bullying.

Saras has run away from Earth, arriving on Primus with nothing but a small bag of belongings, her little robot Kili and a dream of winning the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show, Interstellar MegaChef. As one of Earth’s most celebrated chefs she thinks she stands a good chance, but she is in for a rude awakening to reality.

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