"This serious subject matter belies the sheer fun that Kingsolver has with her endlessly inventive adaptation," writes the TLS, praising the novel's "sharp social observation and moments of great descriptive beauty." (RL) Set in Kingsolver's home region of Appalachia, it transposes Dickens's critique of the injustices of Victorian Britain to contemporary America, where Copperhead lives in near-destitution amid the US opioid crisis. (RL)īarbara Kingsolver's modern reimagining of David Copperfield is a "powerful reworking" of Charles Dickens's most celebrated and personal novel, writes The Guardian, calling it "the book she was born to write". The FT writes that Coe has, "with considerable humour, satire – and at times, acute anger – established himself as the voice of England's political conscience". The novel's events and characters cross paths with those from Coe's trilogy that began with 2001's The Rotters' Club and ended with the acclaimed Middle England (2018), and, like the latter, Bournville is "a state of the nation novel," writes the Observer, one that explores the personal and the political, and the relationship between Britain and Europe with "prose of enduring beauty".
"Now at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time." (LB)Īn avid Europhile and chronicler of modern Britain, Jonathan Coe's latest spans 75 years of British history through the lives of one family living on the outskirts of Birmingham near a famous chocolate factory. The Guardian said: "Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age. A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man's twilight years and the twilight of America." The novel is "all the more affecting and engaging", Colm Toíbín writes in the New York Times, because, in 1978, Holleran wrote the "quintessential novel of gay abandon", Dancer from the Dance. Set in a drought-hit backwater of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand tells the story of a nameless narrator's existence of semi-solitude, as the memories of his other, previous life come and go. "These stories are not only perfectly pitched they come with enough comedy to have you grinning and enough empathy to suddenly stop you in your tracks," writes The Guardian, while according to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Saunders is masterful, he illuminates with a fierce flame". Liberation Day's nine stories consider human connection, power, enslavement and oppression with Saunders' trademark deadpan humour and compassion. Known as a modern master of the form, this is George Saunders' first short story collection since 2013's Tenth of December, which was a National Book Award finalist.
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