How to be a French Girl: A Reading List Posted in: Book club

Rose Cleary’s debut novel How to be a French Girl is just out this week from Weatherglass Books. To celebrate the publication, Cleary put together a reading list of some of the influences and inspirations behind the novel. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Alastair McEwan A young woman takes a final voyage aboard a cruise ship with her distant father. Adrift and trapped, the girl seeks out embodiment through carnal relations with the ship’s crew. Through hardened,…

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‘Keeping Sheila’ from Vida Adamczewski’s ‘Amphibian and Other Bodies’ Posted in: Book club

Vida Adamczewski’s Amphibian and Other Bodies is a feverish and wildly inventive first collection that brings together her award-winning lyric play Amphibian with eleven new short stories, published by Toothgrinder Press today. Read ‘Keeping Sheila’, a story from the collection, below. The queue in the pet shop shambled forward. It was a Thursday afternoon, just after three. All these people should be working, Alice thought. She had an appointment at half past four in Stratford. It would take at…

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‘Amphibian and Other Bodies’: a reading list Posted in: Book club

Vida Adamczewski’s Amphibian and Other Bodies is a feverish and wildly inventive first collection that brings together her award-winning lyric play Amphibian with eleven new short stories, published by Toothgrinder Press. You can read ‘Keeping Sheila’, a story from the collection, here, and below, Adamczewski explores some of the books that inspired her work. Amphibian (adj) living both in water and on land. From the Ancient Greek ἀμφίβιος (amphíbios), meaning “both kinds of life” An unwanted pregnancy completely changed the way I related to…

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Glorious Exploits: a reading list Posted in: Book club

Our Book of the Week is Ferdia Lennon’s debut Glorious Exploits, a brilliantly original historical novel, telling the story of Lampo and Gelon, unemployed potters in 5th century BCE Syracuse (who speak in distinctly modern Irish vernacular), and their quest to stage Euripides with Greek prisoners of war for actors and a quarry for a stage. Lennon told us about some of the inspirations behind the book, from Thucydides’ ‘rollicking good’ account of the Pelopennesian War…

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‘There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy’: an extract from Gillian Rose’s ‘Love’s Work’ Posted in: Book club

Gillian Rose’s classic memoir Love’s Work is being rereleased this month by Penguin Classics. Written in the wake of her terminal cancer diagnosis, this short, powerful book combines the personal and the philosophical to ask the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived? As Marina Warner described it on its 1995 publication, ‘in the compass of a scant 135 pages it provokes, inspires and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and confronts the great subjects…

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‘Empathy! It’s just like melting.’: an extract from Anne Enright’s ‘The Wren, The Wren’ Posted in: Book club

Anne Enright’s latest novel The Wren, The Wren is nominated for the Writers’ Prize (formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize), the only international, English-language award nominated and judged purely by other writers. The Wren, The Wren is a generational saga, which explores the love between a mother and a daughter, and the long shadow of a famous father, whose poems litter the text. Read the opening section of The Wren, The Wren below. There is a psychologist in Nevada called Russell T. Hurlburt who…