Category Fiction

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Ageing, Alzheimer's, Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén review – a novel anyone will take to heart

A huge hit in Sweden, this portrait of one man and his dog as the end approaches is a simple yet effective meditation on mortality, love and care

Lisa Ridzén’s debut, which has been a runaway success in her Swedish homeland and elsewhere, demonstrates how sometimes the simplest storytelling can be the most effective. This is a novel with no clever structural devices or burden of symbolism and a setting so limited geographically that the reader ends up knowing precisely where everything is.

It is narrated by Bo, a former timbermill worker who has reached the age when people worry about him, and has a network of carers calling in three times a day. One of Ridzén’s inspirations was the team journal kept by the carers looking after her dying grandfather; very movingly, bulletins from the journal of Bo’s carers punctuate his narrative, the alternative perspective like a chill breeze through a briefly opened door.

thanhtoong0
July 30, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart review – is this the future for America?

Set a decade from now, this coming-of-age caper offers a child’s-eye view of family troubles in a ‘post-democracy’ USA

Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.

Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Gillian Anderson, Life and style, Miranda July, Romance books, Sách & Tri thức, Sally Rooney, Sex, Yael van der Wouden

More sex please, we’re bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel

From the Women’s prize to the bestseller lists, authors are pushing the boundaries of how explicit the novel can be – and readers can’t get enough

When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden’s brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women’s prize for fiction last month, they weren’t just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July’s exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic’s work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality.

While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today.

thanhtoong0
July 26, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt review – a warmly comic saga of male friendship

This tale of two entrepreneurs dips into the perspectives of real-life tech moguls, with thrilling results

Scottish-German author Alexander Starritt’s debut, The Beast, followed a tabloid journalist; his second novel, We Germans, was about a Nazi. His new book gets us rooting for two wealthy management consultants fresh out of Oxford, both of them men (assuming you haven’t already tuned out). I suspect his agent might have found it easier to pitch a novel about sex criminals, not least because Drayton and Mackenzie’s approach is so unfashionably traditionalist: it’s a chunky, warmly observed, 9/11-to-Covid saga that, while comic in tone and often extremely funny, doesn’t labour under any obligation to send up its protagonists, still less take them down.

James Drayton, born to north London academics, is a socially awkward high achiever who privately measures himself against Christopher Columbus and Napoleon. Joining the McKinsey consultancy firm after coming top of his year in philosophy, politics and economics hasn’t eased the pressure he has always felt to “come up with something so brilliant it was irrefutable, like the obliterating ultra-white light of a nuclear bomb”.

thanhtoong0
July 24, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Father Figure by Emma Forrest review – a slippery tale of teenage obsession

Bristling with sexual, political and emotional angst, this finely tuned coming-of-age tale thrives on the grey areas of adolescence

Father Figure opens with a memory of murders, bought and paid for; then skips briskly to scholarship girl Gail, who is on the verge of being expelled from her expensive London academy for writing a scandalous essay. The connection between death and day school is new girl Agata, the daughter of notoriously corrupt East End businessman Ezra Levy.

Ezra, a man who takes phone calls from Putin, buys football clubs and has had people killed, wants more for Agata than he had when young. Her anorexia is killing her, and he, “fleshy and stupid”, can’t stop it. Gail sets her sights on Ezra: part compulsion, part seduction, an adolescent power game taken to dangerous conclusions.

thanhtoong0
July 21, 2025

Books, Culture, Donald Trump, Fiction, Gary Shteyngart, Sách & Tri thức, US politics

‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

When he left the Soviet Union for a new life in America, the novelist never imagined he would live under another authoritarian regime. Then Trump got back into power ... Is it time to move again?

Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.

This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.

thanhtoong0
July 19, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Fiction in translation, Sách & Tri thức

Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov review – how it feels to lose a father

The International Booker winner explores Bulgarian family life under communism in this moving depiction of a son’s bereavement

The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.

He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love.

thanhtoong0
July 18, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Film, Sách & Tri thức, Woody Allen

Woody Allen to publish his first novel

The controversial film-maker has previously written short stories and essays but this story about a middle-aged Jewish author whose marriage is on the rocks is his first published novel

The first novel by the film-maker Woody Allen is due to be released later this year by independent publisher Swift Press.

The book, titled What’s With Baum?, is about a middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist “consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun”, according to a description from the publisher. Baum’s “turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him”.

thanhtoong0
July 17, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Mental health, Sách & Tri thức, Young people

Pan by Michael Clune review – a stunning debut of teen psychosis

This wild ride of a novel is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence

The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune’s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It’s a place exposed to “the raw death of the endless future, which at night in the midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs”. Just as frightening is Nicholas’s sense that “anything can come in”. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan – a possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety.

Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic – indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. Nicholas successfully prophesies trivial events (the wind rising, someone saying the word “diabetes”) and is haunted by a dead mouse’s squeak. Another boy finds a means of divination in a schlock fantasy novel. Even the pop anthem More Than a Feeling is a path to the uncanny; it’s a song with “a door in the middle of it … like the door on a UFO”. Nicholas becomes convinced that he is perpetually at risk of leaving his body – specifically, that his “looking/thinking could pour or leap out” of his head – and his friends, also being 15 years old, are ready to believe it, too. They are easy prey for Ian, a college-age man who sets himself up as a small-time cult leader among these high-school kids. Ian particularly targets Nicholas, telling him that only they are capable of real thoughts; the others in the group are “Hollows” who have “Solid Mind”, a deterministic mentality with no animating self. “The sound of words from a Hollow mouth,” says Ian, “contains an abyss.” Soon the group is staging rituals incorporating sex, drugs and animal sacrifice.

thanhtoong0
July 16, 2025

Books, Colm Tóibín, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Brooklyn and beyond: Colm Tóibín’s best books – ranked!

As the Irish author turns 70, we rate his best works of fiction – from his latest, Long Island, to his emotionally wrenching ‘masterpiece’

This dispatch from what we might call the extended Colm Tóibín universe is set near the same time and in the same place as his earlier novel Brooklyn (one character appears in both books). It’s the story of a widowed woman who struggles to cope with life after love. If it lacks the drama of some of Tóibín’s other novels, the style is impeccable as ever, with irresistibly clean prose that reports emotional turmoil masked by restraint. There is no ornate showing off. “People used to tease me for it, saying: ‘Could you write a longer sentence?’” Tóibín has said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

thanhtoong0
July 14, 2025

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