First thoughts
This novel defies genre as Henning Mankell ventures away from his usual thriller to a concoction that resists categorisation.
A struggling writer named Jesper Humlin has a chance encounter with an African refugee named Tea-Bag.
She, along with two other refugees — Tania, who has escaped human trafficking, and Leyla, from Iran — provide Jesper with the fresh perspective he desperately needs, but the girls also have their own agenda.
As we are drawn into the shadow world of immigrant life in Sweden, Mankell’s blend of comedy and moving drama provides a voice for those who lose theirs on their journey from oppression to imagined freedom; freedom which is often transient and blighted with prejudice and racism.
For those who enjoy the security of definitively formed fiction, The Shadow Girls may not appeal as it feels like reading two novels at once.
Paul Auster’s novels and screenplays have won him plenty of readers and awards, but there have always been many who found his self-reflexive style and recurrent fascination with a set palette of topics infuriating.
The latter are unlikely to be won over by this elliptical meditation on growing older, which by being told in the second person seems determined to make the reader a mirror to the author’s concerns.
Memoir is, necessarily, an intimate and self-regarding form, but that seems more pronounced given the deliberate physicality of Winter Journal — this is a life measured out in ailments, accidents and meals, Auster’s story told through the stories of parts of his body.
The sections on his family — and in particular his frustrating, fascinating mother — may be more conventionally emotional, but the overall effect is still rather unsettling.
Appropriate, perhaps, for a book written in mortality’s shadow.
After losing his wife and baby daughter to a wildfire that ravaged much of the valley in which they lived, Robert Grainer labours to rebuild his life during the transformation of early 20th century North West America, in this Pulitzer shortlisted novella.
Moving slowly and not burdened by over-explanation or description, it is an astonishingly gripping read.
Johnson’s simple writing allows you to focus on the tragedy of Grainer, who struggles to adapt to an ever-changing world.
Having lost all that matters, he seeks comfort in his own company and falls into a life of solitude, almost completely void of the complications of human interaction.
Sleeping naked outside and howling at the night to encourage wolf cubs, some may argue he goes mad.
Awe-inspiring and heartbreaking, exciting and humbling, this is a recommended read.
This thought-provoking memoir is written by former MTV presenter Kristiane Backer. Against the backdrop of the party scene of celebrity London in the 1990s, Backer tells her story of becoming a Muslim.
She is introduced to Islam during a trip to Pakistan, led by cricketer Imran Khan. Through him and the associates she meets during her travels, Backer is increasingly drawn to a way of life in which total submission to a higher being is the way to achieve happiness.
Ultimately, Backer converts to Islam, and undertakes one of the religion’s defining practices — pilgrimage to Mecca. Backer’s conversion is not without difficulties. She encounters prejudice and ostracism, but the honesty that she imparts, in particular through her exploration of the status of women in Islam, is refreshing. Backer, therefore, manages to produce a sincere account of the experiences of a Muslim convert.
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