In her first novel, Conversations with Friends, a young woman, Frances, enters into an obsessive affair with an older man, a jaded, not overly successful actor. Published in 2017 when Rooney was in her mid-twenties, the protagonist’s naivety is understandable, though this older reader found her difficult to empathise with. In Intermezzo, her commentary on permissible forms of love has matured
The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor
The characters in The Late Americans are in their mid-twenties – elite graduate students in the arts at a mid-western university town: Seamus the poet, dancers Noah and Fatima, Stafford the painter. This is a coming of age novel, a reckoning with adulthood which may have begun in adolescence but is still in progress. It is a fraught time.
The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas
Reading Christos Tsiolkas is a bodily experience. Smells, tastes, touch inhabit the pages. When a character makes the sign of the Cross, there is a pull to mimic the quick touches of thumb, index and middle fingers to the forehead and abdomen, right and left shoulders. Tsiolkas’s characters celebrate their bodies – they are a source of delight, to their owners and to lovers. And he writes good sex.
The Idea of You, Robinne Lee
First published in the Newtown Review of Books Solène Marchand is a 39-year-old co-owner of a stylish mid-size art gallery in Los Angeles, specialising in representing work of women and people of colour. She co-parents her young daughter with her ex, entertainment lawyer Daniel, lives in a beautiful home, travels to Europe regularly on the …
ANNA KATE BLAIR The Modern
This is a novel to savour, its language crystalline, its acute observations tumbling one after the other. In the opening paragraph, Sophia sits at her computer terminal ‘shining the sentences’ for display labels. An Australian, she has moved to the east coast of America where she completed her PhD and now she is nearing the end of a post-doctoral fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Things she would have said herself, Catherine Therese
Catherine Therese follows up her memoir The Weight of Silence with a novel featuring an abrasive yet sympathetic protagonist. My mother thought Catch-22 was one of the funniest books ever written. My dad thought it one of the saddest. Things She Would Have Said Herself reminded me of their observations, careening between tragedy and hilarity.
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of eating and touching, and of the public gaze and its counterpoint, the personal realm. Among its most vivid are the intimacies imparted through the work of an interpreter, the nuances of language conveying meaning beyond mere words.
Anything is possible, Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, is an author of piercing insight. Many a religious and philosophical tome has been written on moral righteousness but in her slim books, Strout’s characters show us how to live a good life.
Your Second Draft 