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The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – ramshackle wanderers in Berlin
California-born, Berlin-based Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer. You never quite know where her sentences are going to go. 'Oh God, Toto, you won't believe what just happened,' says Avianca, a character in her new novel. 'This angel stole my hat. Like a winged monkey. It was blue and kind of glowing and had feather wings.' Such delightfully surprising lines are frequent in Sister Europe, Zink's seventh novel, which follows acclaimed titles The Wallcreeper, Doxology and Avalon, and is set over the course of a Tuesday night in 2023. The setting is a ceremony for an Arabic literary prize, held at a hotel in Berlin. The ensemble cast includes Demian, a German art critic; Nicole, his transgender daughter; Toto, an American-born publisher; Avianca, Toto's date, nicknamed 'the Flake' because she tends to cancel on plans; Livia, who lives in a glass house built by her Nazi great-uncle; and Radi, an Arab prince and the grandson of the prize's organiser. No one is particularly pleased to be there. The speeches drag and, it being a Muslim event, there isn't even any alcohol to help pass the time. The ramshackle group end up wandering the streets of the city, finding themselves at a party in the subway, and then at a Burger King. The conversation is as meandering as their route, taking in anti-Nazi activists – 'Sophie Scholl was hot,' Nicole says – and why 'beef is trans'. All evening, they are trailed by Klaus, an undercover police officer, who spotted Nicole loitering in the red-light district earlier and suspects she is a victim of trafficking. Zink's narration is cool, her humour is dry and her dialogue is convincing. But the promise of her characters' quirkiness doesn't in the end add up to much. Despite its early intrigue, the story feels disappointingly quiet by the end. 'Life is all about raising expectations and seeing them crushed,' thinks Toto early on. A thought that fits Sister Europe too. Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffiths review – a dark discovery upturns a Scottish village
When the preserved body of a woman is found in a peat bog in the Cabrach, Aberdeenshire, it causes a stir in the isolated Scottish community. Some of them believe her uncovering might be the work of the devil. Gabrielle Griffiths's atmospheric debut opens in May 1915. Lizzie, the wife of wealthy landowner William Calder, discovers the corpse while foraging for moss. Her husband has recently left for the first world war and Lizzie resolves to discover the woman's identity and cause of death. She enlists the help of Johnny, an itinerant farmhand and talented singer. Johnny and Lizzie both harbour secrets from the past and this draws them together. The novel is narrated alternately from Johnny and Lizzie's perspectives and tracks back in time to 1905. We learn of Lizzie's disappointed love affair with a childhood friend and how she ended up with her cold, controlling husband, and discover why Johnny changed his name and is on the run from his past. What begins as a rural mystery (Where is the bog woman from? Was she murdered? How did she end up buried in peat?) becomes, instead, an affecting love story. Griffiths grew up in Aberdeenshire and her use of the vernacular vividly conveys the period and a God-fearing, closed community, used to hardship and quick to judge outsiders. She writes well about forbidden desire, guilt and shame, and the seasonal rhythms of a rural community on the eve of radical change. Her description of the ploughmen's brutal initiation ceremony involving the sharing of the 'Horseman's Word' is hard to shake. Lizzie and Johnny may be flawed, but Griffiths has us rooting for them and her unsentimental ending is particularly fitting given the devastation the war will unleash. Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffiths is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal review – a warm story of second starts
Paulette, the protagonist of Kit de Waal's latest novel, isn't perfect: she can be judgmental and stubborn; she often speaks sharply; and she probably drinks too much Appleton rum. But De Waal's candid narration makes it difficult not to love her. The Best of Everything is the Birmingham-born author's sixth book and her first novel for adults since 2018's The Trick to Time. She made her name with her 2016 debut, My Name Is Leon, which established her as a writer full of heart. We meet Paulette, who came to Britain from St Kitts as a child, when she is 29. It's the 1970s and she is an auxiliary nurse. For work she wears 'shoes so sensible they could pass A-level maths'. At home she's desperately in love with Denton, whose 'smell is pure man – sweat, soap and sex'. That's until the worst happens: he is killed in a car crash. Worse still, after his death Paulette learns he has a wife and children he hadn't told her about. All of this happens disconcertingly rapidly, at the beginning. Then, within a page, Paulette is living with Denton's best friend, with whom she has a son called Bird. This is the backdrop to the core relationships Paulette forms in this tale: with Frank, the man who killed Denton in the crash, and Frank's grandson, Nellie, who is about Bird's age and doesn't have a mother of his own. De Waal's tone is warm and wise. She has a knack for the small charming moment, such as when Frank and Nellie arrive late for Christmas dinner at Paulette's. When she opens the door, Frank is wearing oven gloves and holding out a cake tin, which he quickly withdraws. 'Rather too hot at the moment,' he says. 'We had to wait for it to be cooked. We timed it but may have been somewhat over-optimistic.' It's equal parts sitcom material and – when you know that this tie-wearing old man is single-handedly bringing up his grandchild – also devastating. De Waal is funny too, especially when she inhabits Paulette's consciousness and her character's Caribbean inflections become more pronounced. When her friends try to console her after Denton's death, we get: 'Them with their side-eye. Them with their cleverness … how two and two always makes four but Paulette can't count.' You can just see her rolling her eyes. Paulette's tenderness towards Frank and Nellie feels unrealistic at first, while her outbursts elsewhere seem unjustified. But, as she eases herself out of her protective shell, we come to learn that this is a book about forgiveness. And by seeing De Waal's protagonist change some of her ways, we realise that we shouldn't have been so quick to judge her either. The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal is published by Tinder Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya review – teenage lives at the crossroads
The Marabar caves in A Passage to India represent the breakdown of order and communication as well as provoking the terrible accusation that drives EM Forster's story. Sameer Pandya plays with a similar plot device in his compelling US-based novel, including an epigraph from Forster's classic. It is set in southern California, where three teenage boys on the brink of adulthood – stars of their high school American football team with promising college careers ahead of them – attend a party at an abandoned house in the hills. Vikram is an Indian American, while Diego, who is Latino, lives with his academic mother. MJ is white with wealthy parents. Part of the pleasure of Pandya's writing lies in his unravelling of identity politics – a theme explored in his debut, Members Only. In one of three ancient caves, the teenagers confront Stanley Kincaid, a school bully and drug dealer. He drunkenly lunges at them and they hit back to 'calm him down'. Later Stanley emerges from the cave bloodied and battered and accuses the boys of assaulting him, claiming that one of them returned and beat him so badly he had to pretend to pass out. Stanley is hospitalised, the boys are suspended and their brilliant trajectories into college are abruptly threatened. As the school principal investigates the various rumours swirling around the school and tries to ascertain what actually happened, the families meet to assess and limit the damage to their children's prospects. Along the way we learn of their troubled professional and home lives and realise the boys are carrying the weight of their parents' expectations. Pandya, an associate professor in Asian-American studies at the University of California, clearly knows this world. He gets under the skin of his three principals, their hopes, aspirations and uncertainties, contrasting these with the ideals and politics of their parents. Our Beautiful Boys reveals the inequality of America's education system – how it rewards those with money and influence – and is a profound meditation on identity, class, privilege and masculinity. Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Salman Rushdie to publish new collection of stories, The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie will publish a new collection of stories later this year, the first work of fiction he has written since he was attacked in 2022. The Eleventh Hour comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US, all places Rushdie has lived. 'The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last 12 months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind – mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America', said Rushdie. 'And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well.' In one story, two men in Chennai, India, face personal tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Another story revisits the Bombay neighbourhood of Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children, where a magical musician is unhappily married to a billionaire. A third story, set in an English college, sees an undead academic unable to rest until he gets revenge against his former tormentor. 'I'm happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome,' Rushdie added. 'I have come to think of the quintet as a single work, and I hope readers may see and enjoy it in the same way.' The book 'moves between the places [Rushdie] has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left', according to Rushdie's publisher Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House. 'In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the 11th hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?' Rushdie announced that he was working on the forthcoming book last October to an audience at Lviv BookForum. All the novellas 'in some way consider the idea of an ending', he said at the time. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The Eleventh Hour will be Rushdie's first book since publishing Knife, an account of the 2022 attempt on his life, last year. His most recent work of fiction was Victory City, a novel published in 2023, which he completed before he was attacked on stage in New York. Rushdie's other novels include The Satanic Verses and Quichotte. Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker prize, the Booker of Bookers in 1994, marking the prize's 25th anniversary, and the Best of the Booker in 2008, marking the award's 40th anniversary. Rushdie previously published a collection of short stories in 1994 titled East, West. The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie will be published on 4 November (Vintage, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
