Man Booker 2018 – Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

The protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, has grown up in a San Francisco which, she tells us, is a different one to the San Francisco we’ve all heard about: ‘it was not about rainbow flags or beat poetry or steep crooked streets but fog and Irish bars and liquor …

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Susan Hill’s In the Springtime of the Year (1974) #Review

This is a story of bereavement and its painful aftermath. Ruth, a young wife living in a rural English community, loses her husband suddenly. Based on Hill's own experience of grieving for a man she loved in her youth, this is a raw and moving examination of the physical and emotional effects of loss. Ruth's …