Before 2015, I’d never heard of Elena Ferrante. Now we’re reaching the end of the year and it seems like most people of my acquaintance have either just finished Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’ (a quartet of four novels) or are midway through them. If you would like to discover for yourself what all the fuss is about, the best place to start would be at the start with My Brilliant Friend.
Gregory Maguire crossed over from cult to mainstream status with his successful novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and its subsequent adaptation to long-running Broadway show. After Alice is his new release; this time he reinterprets another children’s classic – Alice in Wonderland.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James won this year’s 2015 Man Booker Prize – a hefty honour for a worthy novel which looks at the last three decades of Jamaican history and investigates the ramifications of violence, class and racial upheavals.
If Adam has recommended any book above another this year, it would have to be The Martian by Andy Weir. Especially when the movie first came out and everyone was talking about it, he would say, “Read the book – the book is excellent”. This brought about at least one additional sale, as my mother went and bought it on his word alone. I have it on my Kindle and I will – will – make time to read it.
Another novel getting rave reviews is The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood. Surely a shoo-in to be on the nomination lists of next year’s Australian literary awards, read it now to get ahead.
Here’s the blurb from the publisher’s website:
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert in a story of two friends, sisterly love and courage – a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted.
This is my number #1 book choice this Christmas season.
