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ABC News
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The best new books released in July, from Amy Bloom, Katherine Brabon and more
Welcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best new releases. This month, we bring you two works of translated fiction, including the latest offering from a French literary sensation that our critic Declan Fry declares is "rip-your-hair-out brilliant". Also in the mix are a blackly comic debut about a queer woman's dissolute return to her hometown in New Zealand and a doorstopper exploring the fascinating phenomenon of postwar amnesia inspired by real-life cases of soldiers who lost their memories on the battlefields of World War I. Winter is the perfect time to hunker down with a good book — happy reading. Granta There's a particular pleasure in picking up a new novel by Amy Bloom, an author who writes love stories like no one else. I was a huge fan of her 2018 novel White Houses, a swoony yet clear-eyed fictionalisation of a romance between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. In I'll Be Right Here, Bloom widens her scope, focusing on three generations of an unconventional family in a story that roams from wartime Paris to modern-day New York. At the centre of the story is Gazala, an orphaned Algerian girl who works as a maid and masseuse for the real-life French writer Colette during World War II. Gazala is quiet and loyal, but her gentle visage hides a ferocity and passion that presents itself in surprising ways. After the war, Gazala makes her way to New York, where she is reunited with her beloved adopted brother Samir and finds two new 'sisters' in Anne and Alma Cohen. The bond between these four people, and their various lovers, children, and grandchildren, will remain unbreakable for life. This is a novel that doesn't let the reader settle. Bloom changes time periods, introduces new characters, and drops shocking twists without fanfare or hand-holding. It's not always easy to keep track of who's who, but what emerges is a glorious tapestry celebrating the love found in a chosen family. At a launch event for I'll Be Right Here, Bloom joked that all her books are about the same four topics: family, love, sex, and death. To which I say: why would I want to read about anything else? — Claire Nichols Ultimo Press Thea is 16 and holidaying in Italy with her mother, who hopes to cure her daughter's chronic illness by visiting a renowned healer living in the Umbrian countryside. Sheltered and unworldly, Thea connects her physical condition to her actions, looking for things she can control. She is making sense of herself and her experience, feeling her way toward the contours of adulthood. Her mother, Vera, has also lived with chronic pain for most of her life. Wellness bloggers and health influencers offer Vera solace where doctors and rationalist thinking fail to. Vera knows force of will alone cannot change the body, but the possibility remains tantalising; the idea of release can be dreamt so often it begins to feel real. Is pain singular, isolating, or is it something that can be shared? Playing with ideas of subjectivity and identity, Katherine Brabon moves between Vera, Thea, and a third authorial voice, one that both addresses the reader in the second person and doubles as the characters' own self-address. Brabon is examining how people change in relation to each other — after marriage, after becoming parents — and the nature of the stories we project upon ourselves and others. As you reach the end and Brabon draws the threads together, a wise, tender portrait of the relationship between a mother and daughter emerges. Cure is a beguiling and resonant novel, in which the process of belief and the difficulty of integrating the experience of illness into self-identity is revealed to be extraordinarily fraught. — Declan Fry Bloomsbury American football is as foreign to me as the college and health systems that dominate not just US social and public policy, but an awful lot of fiction as well. Sameer Pandya's Our Beautiful Boys manages to make two out of three of these social systems fascinating and almost explicable: football and college. The story focuses on three teenage boys in their final year of high school, at that cusp between ambition and expectation. Vikram, Diego, and MJ are the beautiful boys of the title; they are smart, athletic, and full of promise. To succeed, they need to show social, academic, and athletic prowess, as part of the performance required to get them into the university of their choice. But the world doesn't operate in the same way for each of them, which they and their families are aware of to different degrees. Vikram's cultural background is Indian, Diego's is Hispanic, and MJ's is as WASP as can be. MJ is the only one with the cultural capital that allows him to walk around shoeless, with an air of disaffection, and the complicated racial dynamics of America play out differently for Vikram and Diego, too. Why does this matter? Because after a triumphant Friday night school football game — where the guts-and-glory and sheer beauty of bodies flashing down a field is depicted with exhilaration — the three boys head off to a party. They meet up with another kid, an annoying bully, Stanley, and the four of them enter a nearby cave. When they leave, Stanley is badly injured. Something has happened — but who did what to whom, and with what consequences? — Kate Evans UQP Nell Jenkins — queer, brash, and prone to bad decisions — escaped her hometown in New Zealand as a teenager after the death of her best friend, April. Now, 15 years later, she's back home to look after her mother, Leigh, who has had a stroke. Caring doesn't come naturally to Nell, who has only returned because she has nowhere else to go. She abandoned her life in Sydney after filing an HR complaint about her boss when their romantic relationship ended. She has no job, no money, and nowhere to live. Her hometown is now a popular weekend getaway spot, but for Nell, it remains a place of casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, and bad memories. For a queer teenager like Nell, home was a place where you could never be yourself. Chapters set in the past reveal more about their friendship and how April died. Nell's unwilling return painfully illustrates how stuck she is in her grief. It's "the centrifugal force … moving me from one dead end to the next". Now 33, Nell's life is a wreck; she's drinking too much, sleeping with the wrong people, and borrowing money she can't hope to repay. "I'm a user and a grifter. A drifter. A down-and-out country song," is how she describes it. Against her better judgement, she's drawn into the world of aging television psychic Petronella Bush, who is in town to revive her ailing career. She claims to hear multitudes of ghostly voices, the murdered girls who become "cautionary tales" for others. Blackly comic, Dead Ends is a book not about closure but the difficult process of rebuilding after loss. Nell, for all her flaws, possesses a crude and mordant wit that will have you guffawing aloud. — Nicola Heath Tuskar Rock Constance Debré's 2022 novel Love Me Tender was revelatory. But Name, her new novel, is perhaps her finest work to date. It concludes an auto-fictional trilogy Debré began in 2018, but you don't need to read the other two novels to fall in love with this one. Name opens as the narrator, having watched over her ailing father for weeks, confronts his death. An avatar of Debré, she is a former (disillusioned) lawyer, born into an illustrious Parisian family trying to maintain "their illusions about nobility, family, France, with their alcoholism, which they pretend not to notice". We delve into Debré's upbringing during the 1970s and 80s. She is ferocious toward the bourgeoisie, castigating a world of children who live with nannies before being shipped off to boarding school. By the time we reach the present day and her life as a lawyer for whom "justice is pointless", Debré has transformed into a woman in radical pursuit of her own story, happily disposing of everything superfluous ("family, marriage, work, apartments, belongings, people"). Debré's prose is a rush. Her voice grabs you by the lapels, hauls you up, and makes you do a double and then a triple-take. Alert, jagged, deadpan, she wakes you. Debré writes with the kind of immediacy you find in authors like Helen Garner, Édouard Louis and Chris Kraus. A paean to the joys of refusal, of realising and accepting there are no gods and no masters, Name is rip-your-hair-out brilliant. — Declan Fry Brazen (Hachette Australia) Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, is a deeply funny little novel that tells the story of what happens after the set-up to so many jokes. An unnamed narrator begins the story facing two things that threaten to change her life: her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie, and she's just found a lump in her breast. She hides her anguish in humour. As she recounts how her husband revealed his affair at an Indian restaurant, she glibly notes it was "a total naan-sequitur". Being playful and flippant is her way of processing the hurt. She becomes obsessed with Maggie, and with her tumour (which she also names Maggie), and starts to think of them in tandem — both cancers, eating away at her sense of normality. When she's lonely or bored or angry or sad, she tells "my Maggie" (the tumour) about it. As a stay-at-home mum, she feels she has built her life around her husband and children, and it's all about to crumble away. She seeks comfort in storytelling, retelling the Chinese folklore she was raised with to her children, desperate to find a message of solace or purpose. Yee's book is weird, poetic, and meandering. The reader is lulled in with humour and domestic intimacy but encounters accounts of grief and mortality along the way. — Rosie Ofori Ward Scribe Publications Why do stories of World War I still hold such resonance? It's something to do with the industrialised death, the iconic images of trenches, and the poetic howls of resistance. But there remains plenty of space for retelling, nuance, and new perspectives, which is what Dutch writer Anjet Daanje delivers in this novel. Daanje begins with a soldier whose backstory has completely disappeared, erased by trauma. Found on a battlefield in Belgium in 1917, wearing a hodgepodge of cast-off uniforms, he cannot remember his name and has no identification. He was discovered at midday, renamed Noon Merckem, and sent to an asylum in Ghent, where he stayed for four years. There he lives a cloistered life, surrounded by other lost soldiers. But the outside world intrudes when his story and photograph are published in the newspaper, and several women turn up in the hope that he might be their missing husband, brother, or son. This experience of amnesia by trauma really happened, as did fraught battles over the 'ownership' and identity of these men. In The Remembered Soldier, a woman named Julienne turns up and says Noon is her husband, Amand — a photographer — and that she's taking him home. All of this happens early in this 560-page novel. What unfolds is a story of memory and its slips; of doubt and survival; of families being remade and poverty in Europe. Cleverly, it's the work of photography that fades in and out of the story, as both a practical skill and as an occasionally manipulated memento, that situates the story in the darkroom of history and literature. — Kate Evans Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
Los Angeles Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In Amy Bloom's exquisite ‘I'll Be Right Here,' Colette plays a key supporting role
Amy Bloom's exquisite 'I'll Be Right Here' is a slim volume spanning close to a century. While it's tempting to label the novel a family epic, that description would fail to capture how Bloom reconstitutes 'family' on the page, or how her chapters ricochet forward and backward from decade to decade or year to year, shifting perspective not only from character to character, but from first- to third-person point of view. These transitions, while initially dizzying, coalesce into a rhythm that feels fresh and exciting. Together they suggest that memory conflates the past, present and future, until at the end, our lives can be viewed as a richly textured tapestry of experience and recollection, threaded together by the people we've loved. The novel opens with a tableau: Siblings Alma and Anne tend to their longtime friend, who's dying. They tenderly hold Gazala's hands in a room that 'smells like roses and orange peel.' Honey — once Anne's sister-in-law and now her wife — massages Gazala's thin feet with neroli oil. 'Anne pulls up the shade. The day is beautiful. Gazala turns her face away from the light, and Alma pulls the shade back down.' Samir 'presses his hand over his mouth so that he will not cry out at the sight of his dying sister.' Later in the novel, these five will come to be dubbed 'the Greats' by their grandchildren. The scene is a foreshadow, and signals that the novel will compress time, dwelling on certain details or events, while allotting mere lines to other pivotal moments, or allowing them to occur offstage, in passing. At first this is disorienting, but Bloom's bold plot choices challenge and enrich. In 1930 Paris, a young Gazala and her adopted older brother, Samir, await the return of their father from his job at a local patisserie, when they hope to sample 'cinnamon montecaos, seeping oil into the twist of paper,' or perhaps a makroud he's baked himself. In their cold, tiny apartment, Samir lays Gazala 'on top of his legs to warm us both, and then, as the light fails, our father comes home.' The Benamars are Algerians, 'descended from superior Muslims and Christians both, and a rabbi,' their father, M., tells them. He delights in tall tales of a Barbary lion that has escaped Northern Africa and now roams the streets of Paris. Years elapse in the course of a few pages, and it's 1942 in Nazi-occupied France. One night before bed, M. Benamar shreds the silk lining from a pair of worn gabardine pants to craft a belt for his daughter. Then,'he lies down on the big mattress he shares with Samir and turns his face to the wall.' He never awakens. Now orphans — we don't know exactly how old they are — the pair must conceal that they are on their own. Samir lines up a job where their father worked, while the owner's wife finds Gazala a position as companion to a renowned writer, offering her 'up to Mme. Colette like a canape.' Colette (yes, that one!) suffers from arthritis, and is mostly bedridden. She hides her Jewish husband upstairs, while entertaining guests below. Gazala observes that her benefactor's 'eyes are slanted under the folds of her brows, kohl-rimmed cat's eyes in a dead-white face, powder in every fold and crack.' Soon, the sister and brother's paths diverge, and Gazala makes her way to New York City. It's 1947. Through Colette, Gazala has found work at a shop on Second Avenue, and sleeps in the storeroom above. Enter Anne and Alma Cohen, teenage sisters who take an instant liking to Gazala and her French accent; in short order, they've embraced her as a third sibling. Months later, there is a knock on the bakery door, and it's Samir, returned from abroad, in search of Gazala. For the rest of their lives, the nonblood-related siblings will conceal that they are lovers. Going forward, the plot zigs and zags, dipping in and out of each character's life. It's 2010 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Samir and Gazala have lived together in a rambling old house for decades, maintaining appearances by keeping separate bedrooms. They are old, and Samir 'brushes her silver hair away from his lips.' She tells him she doesn't mind that he smells of the shallots in their garden. It's 1968, and Anne, by now a wife, mother and lawyer, has fallen in love with her husband Richard's sister, Honey. We glimpse their first sexual encounter after years of simmering emotions. Alma — who receives minimal attention from her author — marries a bighearted chicken farmer named Izzy, and later grieves the early loss of her husband, and the absence of children. As they grow older, the circle consisting of Gazala, Samir, Anne, Alma and Honey will grow to include Lily, Anne's daughter, and eventually Lily's daughter, Harry. Gazala and Samir take in Bea, whose parents were killed in a car accident; she becomes the daughter they never had. This bespoke family will support each of its members through all that is to come. It's 2015 in Poughkeepsie, and Gazala's gauzy figures float through her fading consciousness. Beneath the tree outside her window — 'huge and flaming gold' — sits her father, reading the paper. 'Madame pours mint tea into the red glasses.' The other Greats are gathered round. One last memory, the most cherished of all: It's 1984 and Gazala and Samir are in their 50s. He proposes a vacation in Oaxaca. 'Let's go as we are,' he whispers. At their hotel, 'they sit beneath the arches, admiring the yellow sun, the blue sky, the green leaves on the trees, all as bright as a children's drawing.' There, they freely express their love for each other. As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career, which began in 1993 with the publication of her acclaimed story collection, 'Come to Me,' she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime. Her prose is so finely wrought it shimmers. Again and again she has returned to love as her primary subject, each time finding new depth and dimension, requiring us to put aside our expectations and go where the pages take us. As readers, we're in the most adept of hands. Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah's Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
Boston Globe
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Amy Bloom's new novel brims with love, war, and complexity
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up We begin with a brief prologue set in the unspecified present: a woman named Gazala is dying at home, tended to by three women, Anne, Alma, and Honey, and a man, Samir, who is identified as her brother. Soon, we flash back to Paris in 1930. There, Gazala's first person, present-tense narrative plunges us into a vividly evocative and propulsive story. Her wry reflections on and spirited accounts of life in Paris from 1930 to 1945 and then New York City, where she travels with forged papers and finds a job in a bakery comprise the strongest chunk of the novel. Advertisement This is due in large part to Gazala's irresistible voice, the vibrant setting, the suspense inherent to a tale of occupied Paris and WWII Europe, and the eccentric characters, who range from the French writer Colette, described by Gazala in a chapter title as 'Famous Writer, Anti-Semite, Beloved Friend,' to the jeweler for the Duchess of Windsor. Gazala is gritty, resourceful, hilarious: an irresistible artistic creation. Her life is outlandish and outrageous — she commits multiple murders, without training gives great massages to illustrious people, learns how to seduce men and perform sexually from experienced older women — but she always feels real. Spending time in her mind and in her milieu is an adventure, continually surprising, and consistently rewarding. Advertisement When a new section begins with Samir's arrival in New York City in 1947, however, the style and the tonal acuity change. The narrative voice switches, for the most part, to third person, and the reader feels the loss. The missing intimacy of Gazala's narrative and the crackling idiosyncrasy of her voice leave a palpable void. Related : Samir and Gazala, now lovers and life partners, end up settling down in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Samir works his way up in a department store, achieving financial success and domestic happiness with his sister/lover. And from this point, the chapters move back and forth in time with no rhyme or reason, jumping from Poughkeepsie to Mexico to New Jersey, from 2015 to 1968 to 1984, as characters pile up and depth is sacrificed for collage. The novel gains little by its leaps backward and forward and sideways in time and space, which feel arbitrary and often interrupt momentum, disrupt flow, and muddle things for the reader. Even a writer as adept as Bloom at characterizing someone with an arresting image —'Madame shakes off a couple of shawls like an old warhorse hearing the bells of battle' — or telling life summary — 'David will go to Brooklyn College and eventually become an accountant in New Jersey with a fat, kind wife and no one will feel sorry for him' — can't overcome the effect of superficiality. Advertisement Thus while sections of the book enchant, moments and lines provoke laughter, knowing nods, or a delighted smile, the overall effect deflates our hopes. 'I'll Be Right Here' reads more like a collection of vivid sketches, haphazardly bundled, than a finely wrought and fully realized novel. The parts are greater than the whole, the ingredients tastier than the dish. Related : But how succulent, spicy, and nourishing Bloom's ingredients can be! At one point Gazala remarks: 'A good storyteller has memories and caraway seeds and cinnamon sticks and candied dates in his pocket.' Bloom's eccentric perspectives, unusual characters, and warm-hearted approach make her storytelling alluring just as the story itself is often incomplete and confusing. Bloom's virtues and values are evident on every page of this endearing if ultimately somewhat unsatisfying book. The novel makes important points about immigration, acceptance of difference, open-mindedness to alternative ways of living and loving, and the preciousness and wisdom of our elders in a refreshingly non-didactic way. A wryly humorous, emotionally generous, and expansively embracing author, Bloom approaches each of her characters with empathy, insight, and sensitivity. She remains acutely aware of the absurdities of life, its harrowing hardships, and its fragile, fleeting joys. What is perdurable, what binds us together over space and time, countries and continents, in war and in peace, are found family, good humor, and love. Advertisement I'LL BE RIGHT HERE By Amy Bloom Random House, 272 pages, $28 Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of ' ' and ' .'
Hindustan Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Aditya Roy Kapur leaves his Mumbai home after woman enters with false claims, police register FIR: Report
In a scary incident, a woman entered actor Aditya Roy Kapur's Mumbai home with false claims and refused to leave. As per a Free Press Journal report, Aditya was out shooting on Monday evening for one of his projects when the woman came to his home in Bandra West's Rizvi Complex. (Also Read | Metro In Dino first look: Aditya Roy Kapur, Sara Ali Khan, Ali Fazal battle their emotional upheavals. Watch) The actor's house help, Sangita Pawar, asked 47-year-old woman Gazala Jhakaria Siddique a few questions and was made to believe that she brought clothes and other gifts for the actor. Upon his return home, Sangita told Aditya about the woman. However, after seeing her, Aditya said he couldn't recognise her. The woman tried to approach him, which led him to leave the house and contact society manager Jayashree Dunkdu, who, in turn, informed Aditya's manager, Shruti Rao. She then contacted the Khar police. When Sangita asked the woman to leave, she insisted that she would stay at Aditya's home. The Khar police reached Aditya's home and started an investigation. Gazala, a resident of Dubai, was asked why she visited Aditya's home and from where she had come. However, she avoided answering the questions. The police then registered a case against Gazala following a complaint filed by Sangita. As per the preliminary investigation, the police concluded that Gazala had unlawfully entered Aditya's Mumbai home with a possibility of criminal intent. An FIR was filed against Gazala under Section 331(2) (Punishment for house-trespass or house-breaking) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Fans will see Aditya next in Metro In Dino, helmed by Anurag Basu. Backed by producer Bhushan Kumar, the film introduces a world of modern love and relationships. The film also stars Anupam Kher, Pankaj Tripathi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Sara Ali Khan, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Ali Fazal, Neena Gupta and Saswata Chatterjee. The film is set to release on 4 July.
