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      Charco Press wins Republic of Consciousness prize for ‘gut-punch’ novel

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 April - 19:30

    Of Cattle and Men by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, is set in a slaughterhouse in an isolated corner of Brazil

    Charco Press’s Of Cattle and Men by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, has won the Republic of Consciousness prize, which recognises books from small publishers.

    The 99-page book, described as a “gut-punch of a novel” by the judge Sana Goyal, is set in a slaughterhouse in an isolated corner of Brazil where cows begin to disappear, seemingly by suicide.

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      The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya review – sun, sex, scenery and family guilt

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 April - 08:00 · 1 minute

    A playwright brings unresolved memories to the stage in this clever study of art, dysfunction and generational difference

    Jo Hamya’s first book, Three Rooms , was a polemical novel about middle-class precarity, sophisticated but sometimes bowed by the weight of its thematic concerns. Her second, The Hypocrite, is a novel about a play about a novel. It begins with a mother on a beach in Sicily watching her husband and toddler daughter paddling. The mother doesn’t much like the father, who “worked on his novel in the other room” for much of the holiday. She resents her invisibility. And then we skip to 2020, London, and an autobiographical play cautiously produced in semi-lockdown, in which a teenage Sophia and her father stay in a borrowed villa on a Sicilian island in August.

    The stage father is writing a novel, or mostly dictating it for the stage daughter to type. His novel is about a novelist having sexual adventures while taking a holiday on a Sicilian island. While the adult Sophia’s father watches the play, Sophia herself has lunch with her mother. Sophia and her mother discuss, over a lot of wine and some barely touched Italian food, Sophia’s father’s probable reaction to seeing himself and his writing and his relationship with his daughter performed on stage. Sophia’s father is indeed dismayed by her representation of him and his work, and becomes increasingly distressed as he wanders London after the play rejecting her increasingly anxious calls.

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      Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton review – breathing new life into old texts

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 April - 06:30

    How one teacher wrestles meaning and relevance from classics of English literature

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that the books you studied at school are the ones that stick with you for ever. In my case it was Pride and Prejudice, but for you it might have been Macbeth or Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. These are the texts you know by heart because, once upon a time, you spent two years annotating them using different coloured pens and consigning chunks to memory.

    But what broader, deeper kinds of learning might be available to teenagers studying English literature at school, asks Carol Atherton . For the past 25 years she has taught both GCSE and A-level in state secondary schools in Lincolnshire. Now, in a dozen carefully prepared “reading lessons”, she demonstrates how a generous and attentive teacher is able to wrestle meaning and relevance from old warhorses such as An Inspector Calls and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings .

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      Crime and thrillers of the month – review

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 16 April - 08:00 · 1 minute

    An unreliable narrator keeps her husband and readers guessing; the welcome return of burned-out cop Jake Jackson; a multilayered family thriller; and a disturbing boarding school secret

    We don’t learn the name of the protagonist of Scarlett Thomas ’s gloriously dark and tangled thriller, The Sleepwalkers (Scribner), for some time, but it’s immediately clear that we are in the hands of that most joyous device, an unreliable narrator, and that she’s out to justify something bad that’s happened. She’s writing a letter to her husband, Richard, to explain why she has left him behind on the Greek island where they’ve come for their honeymoon. Their love, she says, is “forever cursed”; there is another woman involved, Isabella (“I find it so hard to write her name”). We learn of some former guests at the hotel where they’re staying, a couple known as “the sleepwalkers”, who walked into the sea and drowned. Our narrator is prone to the dramatic – looking at a painting of some tulips, she says “the red flowers looked like large wine glasses full of blood, or – and I have no idea why I thought this – stuffed with meat”.

    She’s hard to trust: “From now on, everything I say I will imagine you disagreeing with, saying ‘It wasn’t like that’ or ‘You’re not being fair.’” Thomas, author of the acclaimed The End of Mr Y , tells her story through fragments of letters, torn notebook pages and audio transcripts; it’s a lot of fun trying to work out the truth of what’s happened, and I’m not sure I ever really got there, but that didn’t remotely affect my enjoyment of this clever thriller. As one character later says, critiquing one version of the story (because there are many), it’s “too experimental and too dark. They said they still didn’t know who the sleepwalkers really were and who, if anyone, had killed them.” This isn’t too experimental, it’s just dark enough, and I highly recommend it.

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      You Are Here by David Nicholls review – love is in the fresh air

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 16 April - 06:00 · 1 minute

    The One Day author’s new will-they-won’t-they tale, about two divorcees who find themselves walking the Lakes and Pennines, is a great comic novel – and superb on the landscape

    The proximity of the publication of David Nicholls’s sixth novel, You Are Here , to the screening of the superb Netflix remake of One Day gives the new book an added sense of poignancy. If One Day (2009) saw Nicholls as a writer in his mid-40s looking back nostalgically on the loves and losses of twentysomethings, here we find him approaching 60 and turning his attention to a couple either side of 40. If One Day was angst and high drama, the setup here is softer and, initially at least, more obviously comic. But the shadow of the earlier novel, of Dexter and Emma’s will-they-won’t-they romance, hangs over this book.

    Michael Bradshaw, a geography teacher reeling from a series of personal setbacks, most painfully his separation from soon-to-be ex-wife Natasha, decides to walk Alfred Wainwright’s famous coast to coast path through the Lakes and the Pennines. His happily married colleague Cleo, despairing at his inability to move on, turns what was going to be a solitary excursion into a party. She invites a motley gang along for the first leg of the walk: Conrad, an “absurdly attractive” pharmacist; Cleo’s taciturn teenage son, Anthony; and Marnie Walsh, a copy editor, “aged 38, of Herne Hill, London”. There was supposed to be another friend, Tessa, whom Cleo had invited as a potential match for Michael, but she drops out at the last minute.

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      Mania by Lionel Shriver review – we need to talk about stupidity

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 15 April - 08:00 · 1 minute

    The US author’s novel about a cancelled lecturer in a parallel dystopia that prizes ignorance is missing her usual verve

    L ionel Shriver ’s new novel, a hymn to inclusivity and kindness – just kidding – takes place in a parallel recent past as western civilisation withers under the grip of the Mental Parity movement (“the last great civil rights fight”), which insists there’s no such thing as stupidity, preferring to speak of “alternative processing”. Effects run from the retrospective cancellation of Frasier (because the Crane brothers are “brain-vain”) to tens of millions of Covid vaccine deaths (because newfangled employment practices stopped Pfizer hiring qualified staff, resulting in the inadvertent creation of a toxic serum).

    World-building as trolling, basically. The saga unfolds in Pennsylvania from the point of view of a contrarian lecturer, Pearson, cancelled amid the war on wisdom after she bravely makes Dostoevsky’s The Idiot required reading – the very title being outlawed, natch – before being caught on camera ranting about “retards”; footage that sweeps through the press, who are more concerned with “cognitive bigotry” than with Moscow and Beijing rampaging through their neighbours “because the western world was wholly caught up in this Mental Parity fiasco”.

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      The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey review – a deft saga of Ireland’s evolution

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 14 April - 12:00 · 1 minute

    A pregnancy leads to the unearthing of a mother and daughter’s secrets and struggles in this skilful debut novel

    When Nell, a chef, agrees to try for a baby with her partner, Adrienne, a stylist for celebrity food bloggers, she anticipates failed IVF cycles and a financial and emotional toll that will soon nix the plan. Instead, Adrienne conceives after two rounds, and Nell, terrified of looming parenthood, is pitched into a reluctant reckoning with the ghosts of her teenage years in turn-of-the-millennium Ireland. A cult-like Catholic youth movement, denial of her own sexuality, teen pregnancy – all play their part, and yet even this is not the full story.

    Having already caught the attention of prize juries with her short fiction, Niamh Mulvey delivers a questing first novel of significant prowess. Its title refers to the fraught changes to Ireland’s abortion legislation and its impact on women’s lives, her exploration of which is deepened by a second narrative strand: the coming-of-age of Nell’s mother, Dolores, on the fringes of the country’s nascent feminist movement in 1980s Dublin.

    The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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      I’m F*cking Amazing by Anoushka Warden review – a filthily frank, funny and moving debut

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 14 April - 10:00 · 1 minute

    The British playwright’s first novel is sweary and saucy but also tender and soulful once it reveals its true heart

    Anoushka Warden’s debut novel bowls in from line one like a mixture of Adrian Mole, Victoria Wood, Kathy Lette and a vintage Just Seventeen article that encourages you to look at your undercarriage in a hand mirror: “By my mid-20s I thought I had my fanny and its workings all figured out… I just had this deep trust in it. That it was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Which, primarily, was finding orgasms from all the ways possible to it, ie fingerings, lickings and dry humping.” For the next 40 pages, it proceeds as an “autovagiography”, with the men this “fanny” encounters being ranked on an itemised “Top Humps” scoreboard: “Spanish Alan… always carried lube in a mini bumbag (for his bike).”

    Warden is a writer for stage and screen – keeping up the sweary, self-deprecating theme, her debut play was the acclaimed My Mum’s a Twat – and she is skilled at maintaining her narrator’s breezy humour and heartbreakingly transparent facade of streetwise carelessness. But it’s exhausting for the reader, who may wonder why this adult tale is being told with kids’ fiction cadences: her boyfriend’s job “was the sort where he had to sound clever to do it and most of the people who worked in his office had all been to the same university, had very posh accents, were in cricket teams together and shortened their surnames to create nicknames like Diko (Dickens), Wilko (Wilkins), Hamo (Hammings) – which they always said like a football chant”.

    I’m F *cking Amazing by Anoushka Warden is published by Trapeze (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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      In brief: The Illusionist; The Borrowed Hills; Second Self – review

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 14 April - 08:00

    A fascinating biography of a true British army maverick, an ambitious Cumbrian western and a nuanced novel about a classic modern dilemma

    Robert Hutton
    Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25, pp354

    To order The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler , The Borrowed Hills or Second Self go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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