January 12, 2026 by Claire 'Word by Word'

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is one of my favourite writers, ever since being lent The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) and then on learning she had been a Rumi scholar, was delighted to read The Forty Rules of Love (2009).

She is one of the most interesting and prolific authors of cross-cultural fiction, and made the transition in 2004 from writing in Turkish and being translated into English, to writing directly in the English language. She made the decision to write in English to have distance and freedom from political and social pressures implicated by writing in her native language, and to approach her heritage and subjects of interest from an alternative perspective.

A Profound Dedication

Her engagement in writing about social issues, multicultural and political themes and her relocation to London from Istanbul, and her deep engagement with history, identity, gender, religion and cultural themes, her regular speaking out, her weekly essays to followers and her prize nominations have all contributed to raising her profile to the point of being elected President of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in the UK in 2025, succeeding Bernardine Evaristo. She is a great writer and an important connector between cultures, disciplines and literary communities.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, the prize that year won by Bernadine Evaristo for Girl Woman Other. I spotted this on the shelf at the library I mentioned in my last post, along with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell and You Are Here by David Nicholls. I immediately jumped to read the Elif Shafak and I am happy to see there are few more of her backlist I might be able to get to this year as well.

Shafak’s novel starts with the intriguing title, what exactly is the meaning of 10 minutes and 38 seconds? The novel starts with a seven page chapter called The End. We are confronted with the early morning discovery of the body of Leila, before any of her friends have learned of her premature death/murder.

Once the authorities had identified her, she supposed they would inform her family. Her parents lived in the historic city of Van – a thousand miles away. But she did not expect them to come and fetch her dead body, considering they had rejected her long ago

You’ve brought us shame. Everyone is talking behind our backs.

So the police would have to go to her friends instead. The five of them: Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122, and Hollywood Humeyra.

A Post Death Structure

The book then is structured into, Part One: The Mind, Part Two: The Body and a very short few pages, Part Three: The Soul. In Part One we learn about the significance of the 10 minutes 38 seconds and this is what the chapters pertain to.

During this period of time when the victim is dead her consciousness is replaying memories, aromas, all of the things that she has sensed and experienced and known, and it is in these chapters that we learn about her past with her family and we are introduced to the five friends. These are the flashbacks of her life passing through her consciousness. Thus forming the structure of this first half of the novel.

Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?

As each minute passes and each sense is evoked and each friend is remembered, there is then a short story about that friend and how they came to the name they now hold and what brought them to the city of Istanbul where they all resided until this moment.

Friends on a Mission

Photo by Kathryn Archibald on Pexels.com

When we get to Part Two: The Body, the consciousness has left the body and we arrive in the present moment with the five friends trying to deal with the fact that their friend is missing, is dead, and no one will allow them to visit her.

“Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”

The want to pay their respects, to do something for her, but the city has already judged her and made decisions without the consent of family or friends, so this part of the novel becomes something of an adventure as the friends bond together to make amends for the current situation and try to do something for their dear friend. And go on a road trip in an old truck.

A Clever Structure Dulls Character Recall

The only trouble I found with the clever format of the first half, was that because it all takes place in the past and each chapter is about a different friend, by the time they all come together half way into the novel, it is not as easy to remember who they are, because they haven’t been regularly present in the text until now.

Thus it created a disconnect for this reader, who likes to imagine each character as they are introduced, but they need to stay present for that image and impression of them to last. I found that I had to refer back to the beginning to recreate that sense of the character, in order to recall who they were.

Overall I found it an enjoyable read, the characters come from all walks of life, mostly marginalised for one reason or another and in their neighbourhood they have found each other, look out for each and wish to challenge the way they and others like them are treated. By coming together to do something for Leila, they are also challenging the way their city deals with others who have been marginalised, that grief, burial, remembrance and recognition of those who have passed should be something universal that all can participate in, regardless of where life has taken them.

Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of family in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home.

It’s a beautiful fable-like story, much of it inspired by real circumstances, real places and conditions and inspired by friendships lived by the author from time lived in the city of Istanbul.

Highly Recommended.

Author Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and storyteller. She has published 21 books, 13 of which are novels and her books have been translated into 58 languages.

Shafak is a Fellow and President of the Royal Society of Literature and has been chosen among BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women. An advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice TED Global speaker.

January 10, 2026 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024)

After donating a bag of books at a recent book sale, I spotted a few novels on the shelves of this small English library that I was curious about, so joined the library and came home with four popular titles I thought I might read over the festive season, the first one being Intermezzo by Irish author Sally Rooney. I had heard it discussed by the Irish Times Woman’s Podcast Bookclub where thoughts on it were quite divisive.

Sally Rooney’s earlier novels Conversations With Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) all examine how educated young people try to love each other under conditions of class inequality, political exhaustion, and intense self-consciousness, where desire is constantly constrained by these factors and the question then becomes whether love can survive these somewhat undermining conditions.

An Irish Millennial Perspective

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Irish literature 2025

I haven’t read anything by Rooney, however knowing those novels have been a huge international success, being a writer with her literary pen poised on particular millennial characteristics, I picked up the latest, Intermezzo (2024) set in modern day Dublin, to understand what that might be all about.

I finished it in late December and overall I enjoyed it, though in the beginning I found it a little tiresome and repetitive, especially all the awkward self-conscious sex scenes between the younger brother and his newfound lover, but as the story progressed and the conflicts and mysteries become more present in the narrative, it became ever more psychologically interesting and I ended up really liking it. So it almost lost me in the beginning, but ultimately (in 442 pages) it gets there and I’m all the more appreciative of it for going back and considering it again now, from a distance.

Grief As a Turning and Growth Point

The Kindness of Enemies Leila Aboulela The Queen's Gambit Intermezzo Sally Rooney — Photo C. Solorzano Pexels.com

The novel charts the months following the father’s premature death and how it affects his two sons Ivan 22, a socially awkward, competitive chess player who has not been on form recently and is questioning whether he might be past his best, and his elder brother Peter 32, a corporate, detached Dublin lawyer juggling two relationships and medicating himself to get sleep.

You know, a lot of people told me I was letting it take up too much time, and I just thought they didn’t understand. But now I think, maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life.

Unresolved Mother Son Issues

The boys mother has long since moved on to a new relationship and the boys have complicated relationships with her.

I guess I would say, if you’re interested, they’re both kind of dominant personalities. Who like getting their own way. So my mother trying to be the authority figure, that never went down too well with Peter, if you get me. Because he wouldn’t be a great fan of getting bossed around.

I see, Margaret says.

Ivan is looking at her. Yeah, he says. Whereas with me, I guess, my mother can be the authority more. But with no great results, because she’s never happy with me.

The brothers have different personalities and are no longer close like they once were. In fact, they find it difficult being around each other without emotions escalating to volatility. And yet. Underneath, there’s a desire to connect.

Without their father present in their lives, they get easily derailed, falling into old destructive patterns. Something needs to shift and change if they are to arrive in a place of acceptance.

The same ritual he thinks each time. She tries to extract from him some valuably hurtful information and he tries to conceal from her any aspect of his life in which he suspects she might gain a foothold. Her fake innocuous queries and his studied evasions. Screens her calls whenever Naomi is home. Why does his mother even want to know; why does he want not to. Contest for dominance. Story of his life.

In essence, this is what the novel explores. Are these two brothers able to grow through the grieving process into a new form of relationship with each other that might sustain them in the years ahead? And can they successfully be in a relationship with another, given the stagnant place they are currently at.

Millennial Self-Consciousness and Entangled Love Lives

They are each trying to navigate romantic relationships, and here there is much interiority expressed, both anxiety and indecisiveness, but the feelings push them forward and the interactions they have with women allow them to be tested and move forward as they confront someone else they have feelings for and have to adapt to stay in relationship.

Ivan meets the older, separated Art Centre Manager, 36 year old Margaret, who struggles with how they might be perceived due to the age difference, but she can’t deny the strong connection and positive effect they have on each other. They must explore their own different perspectives and experiences to maintain that something they have together, if it is deemed worth it.

Dimly she wonders now whether she has been thinking somehow about herself, her own circumstances, and she feels her face again growing flushed. It is this, she thinks, her own sense of identification, that has thrown everything into confusion. She has lost sight of the brother Ivan has been describing, replacing him with herself, and therefore attributing to herself a greater understanding of his motives than she could possibly possess.

Peter is navigating the familiar, intellectually compatible friendship with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, a chronically ill English literature professor he’s known since college, and a more challenging, non-committal relationship with student Naomi who sells images of herself online to help fund her studies.

Unclear whether you’re cheating on me with her, or you’re cheating on her with me, she said. Absentmindedly he considered the proposition. Either option preferable he thought. Dignity of old-fashioned faithlessness. Neither, he answered. Sylvia is a very dear friend of mine. And you’re just a homeless college student who lives in my house. That made her laugh. The actual disrespect, she said.

Using Voice Stylistically to Create Power Dynamics

Rooney explores how intimacy is negotiated under constant moral and social evaluation, both from the family and society and from one’s own self-judgement.

Peter’s thoughts are expressed in short, clipped, declarations with little depth, a voice trained to avoid vulnerability, and control interpretation, reducing the risk of him being misunderstood or judged, which doesn’t always help navigate the path of more intimate relationships.

This controlled minimal manner of speaking suits his profession and will have developed as he absorbed criticism in the maternal relationship and created a habit regarding his brother. His short sentences create discomfort, they become a form of domination by withholding forcing the other to elaborate.

They are initially disconcerting to read, but after a while you get used to the style. This manner has been said by some to be ‘Joycean’ not because it is like Ulysses in style, but because it shares with Joyce a particular attitude to consciousness, authority, and language under pressure. This way of expression gives Peter’s voice a hard, self-contained quality that Joyce often gave to male consciousness.

Meanwhile Ivan’s longer, more considered sentences allow for doubt and consideration, for exploration and confirmation in the relationship. Oh, and there is a touching storyline around the family whippet.

A Long Positional Game

Ultimately every character has a reckoning, no one is immune to the need to look at their own part in creating some of the perceived conflict and the novel travels the arc from the initial state of these relationships, through the hashing things out, blame, judgement, self pity, self consciousness, fear of what others might think, and out the other side to talking it out, owning up, allowing unconventionally without fear of judgement, settling differences through to forgiveness.

It’s not a fast paced read, it’s more of a slow, gradual navigation of challenging relationships between not particularly likeable characters, but that makes it all the more interesting to see how and whether they might overcome the exit of the one person who was their centre, and move to a healthier way of co-existing. It is an exploration of buried pain and unresolved issues meeting new opportunities and fresh hurts. A long, positional game played in mutual fear of getting it wrong.

Author Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist from Castlebar, Country Mayo. She is the author of Conversations With Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Interesting Fact: While attending Trinity College Dublin, Rooney was a university debater and in 2013 became the top debater at the European Universities Debating Championships.

December 20, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Best Reads of 2025 Top Fiction

In 2025, I read 75 books from 22 countries (the exact same number of countries as in 2024), 55 of those titles were fiction and 20 were nonfiction.

73 percent of my reads were by female authors and 27% by male authors. Of the total books read, 15% were books in translation, originally written in a language other then English.

I will be sharing my One Outstanding Read of the year, the runner up, Top 9 Fiction, tomorrow my Top 8 Non-Fiction and since there were so many excellent reads, the following day Top 7 Reads in Translation.

One Outstanding Read of 2025

My One Outstanding Read of the year for 2025 is the non-fiction memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) by Arundhati Roy, (review to come), a phenomenal, engaging, wide-ranging book that is as much about her mother Mary Roy as it is herself. From the back cover:

‘In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.’

Mother Mary Come to Me by Arundhati back cover photo of author

It is about the family she was born into, the matriarch Mary Roy she was raised by, the controversy around their housing, as her mother struggled initially to raise two children on her own, the lawsuit Mary Roy would launch against her brother and mother that changed inheritance laws in their state; the school Mary Roy founded and how it was being the child of the school principal. We follow Arundhati Roy through her seven year estrangement from family, her architectural studies, her early film-making ventures, her relationships and difficulties in them due to the strong values she held.

“When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became”

It is a raw, honest account and an insight into a passionate, dedicated, creative individual, who won the Booker Prize with her debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997) a feat that had a major effect and influence on what she has been able to do in life, and enabled the support she has been able to provide to other causes, in order that they remain independent and are not compromised by the stultifying agendas of large corporate and NGO organisations.

Outstanding Read Runner Up 2025

Someone is Walking On Your Grave My Cemetery Journeys Mariana Enriquez

Somebody is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys (2025) by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina) tr. Megan McDowell (Spanish) – I have to mention this book as it was also an outstanding, unique and far-reaching book that kept me entranced for the most part of October, as the author travels in 13 countries visiting 21 cemeteries, (something she is passionate about) sharing cultural anecdotes about each country, history, legend and their relationship to the dead. She wrote these essays over a period of about 25 years, starting with a visit to Genoa, Italy with her mother through two and half decades of experience, learning, and journeying that no doubt continues in her life today.

It’s not so much macabre, as it is insightful to learn about some of the communities of people she comes across, like the Welsh speaking community in Patagonia, what it means to have Taphophilia syndrome, the controversy surrounding the Pietro Gualdi marble sculpture of a seated woman in New Orleans, people who have already constructed elaborate tombs for themselves ahead of time, the dilemma of the 12th century Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris that led to the catacombs, the first date she has with her Australian boyfriend, taking him to the aristocratic Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, where Eva Peron was finally laid to rest (after much debate, body snatching and travel). The entire book was an eye-opener and an unforgettable read and one I highly recommend.

Top Fiction

Small Worlds (2023) by Caleb Azumah Nelson (UK/Ghanaian) – a brilliant, meandering coming-of-age story set mostly in Peckham, London. A story-line that spans three years as he finishes school and decides what to do next, it is an introspective excavation of a young British-Ghanaian man’s soul, the situations he will encounter and confront, as he matures and grows into a version of himself that he likes. I read this early in the year and this one is my Number 1. Top Fiction of the Year.

Second Class Citizen Buchi Ememcheta Nigerian Literature Classic London

Second Class Citizen (1974) by Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria/UK) – I read The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta some years ago and loved it and have long wanted to read this. It’s absolutely brilliant and poignant and tells the story of a young Nigerian girl in the 1960’s, much like the author herself, determined to get herself an education and raise herself up in the world, which she does – until a marriage and in-laws start to rely on her as their income source, so she sets London in her sights, only for the challenges to increase as children begin to appear – as a woman she has no control over her reproductive rights. It is a powerful story of a woman dealing with and overcoming the odds, in her home country and as an immigrant.

Buchi Emecheta, while raising five children, published novels, obtained a degree in sociology, wrote plays for television and radio, worked as a librarian, teacher, youth worker and sociologist, and community worker. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983.

Black Woods Blue sky by Eowyn Ivey book cover, the words a reference to Proust, the cover shows black tree trunks and a blue background, behind a tree a standing bear, his shadow is the shape of a man

Black Woods, Blue Sky (2025) by Eowyn Ivey (Alaska) – Eowyn Ivey remains one of my favourite authors, most known for her debut novel The Snow Child (2012). She also wrote The Bright Edge of the World (2016) and now her latest, a novel that subtly references Beauty and the Beast, is her most autobiographical novel and again set in her local region of the wilds of Alaska.

It is the story of a troubled, young mother Birdie, her six year old daughter Emaleen and a reclusive character Arthur. Ignoring the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to Arthur’s isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact. At first everything is idyllic, until it is not and this sense of things not being quite right creates acute suspense while reading. Ivey has a wonderful way of capturing the magic and menace of the wilderness while creating down to earth characters and that hint of an unsettling feeling lurking beneath the narrative.

Fundamentally Nussaibah Younis shortlisted womens prize set in UN Iraq comedy in print

Fundamentally (2025) by Nussaibah Younis (UK/Iraq/Pakistan) – Not reviewed here, but one of my favourite reads of 2025, I just loved the comic narrative voice of Fundamentally and the unique setting of a UN workplace in Iraq, even if some of the characters were somewhat cliche. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2025.

When academic Nadia is disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, she decides to leave, accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia observes the inside of world international aid and finds herself quickly compromised. As the tension ratchets up, as Nadia tries to make up for her mistakes, the humour fades and the danger increases, as they cross lines that can’t be reversed.

Younis is a fearless, talented writer, creating fiction from a place of knowledge that not too many authors occupy and is able to bring depth, humour and insight to serious subjects. I found it a relief to read a light version of the harsh reality of war zones and displacement, still having the imprint of Sally Hayden’s ambitious award-winning work of nonfiction, My Fourth Time We Drowned, which depicts the plight of those seeking asylum, risking their lives taking small craft across the Mediterranean.

The Marriage Portrait (2022) by Maggie O’Farrell (Ireland/UK) – In 1540 -1561 Renaissance Italy, we encounter the story of Lucrezia of Florence, who, due to the death of her older sister Maria, becomes the intended fiance of the man her sister was going to marry, Alfonso of Ferrara. It tells of her childhood in Florence, her year of wretched wifedom, her solace in creating art and the act of sitting for a portrait that she dislikes.

Told in twin timelines, childhood and marriage, beginning with a historical note in the opening pages about her alleged death, there is an underlying tension and suspicion all the way through the narrative which adds to the pace and intrigue. The character of Lucrezia is exquisitely constructed and rich in visual imagery, thanks to her artistic inclinations, despite the fact that she is often confined to quarters. The era of Renaissance Italy, the day to day lives, the close environment of these dynastic families is intricately portrayed and sumptuously imagined.

Look out for more historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell in 2026, Land is set in 1865 Ireland.

Scottish Island literature Clear by Carys Davies Wales

Clear (2024) by Carys Davies (Wales/UK) – Clear is a short historical novella that gripped me from the opening pages and transported me to 1843 Scotland, the time of the Great Disruption, the Highland Clearances. It is about a quiet, worrisome, rebel pastor, John Ferguson, his wife Mary and Ivar, a lone islander out in the North Sea, somewhere between the Shetland Islands and the coast of Norway.

John, like other rebel ministers who signed the controversial Act of Separation and Deed of Demission, is under financial pressure to meet his new responsibilities and accepts a paid role from a landowner’s factor against his wife’s wishes. He must visit a remote island in the north and evict the last inhabitant. Evocative of its time and place. I thought this was a brilliant, atmospheric tale.

Flashlight by Susan Choi set in Japan USA and North Korea

Flashlight (2025) by Susan Choi (US) – Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Flashlight interested me because of its portrayal of a cross-cultural marriage (American and Korean-Japanese) and family that highlights the tensions between adults with different backgrounds and expectations, coping within one culture (America), while Louisa, the child of that union navigates her own life and connection to her parents.

Also the further stretch of scope and understanding it provides, as the narrative moves from the US to Japan to North Korea, because it concerns a family exiled from Jeju Island in South Korea, living in Japan, wanting to return. Their son Serk (Louisa’s father) has grown up and been educated in Japan and values that education, resists his family’s desire, while they wish to take up an offer to return.

When Serk goes missing, the narrative splits and we follow each family member on their own timeline, observing our characters while learning something of a complicated history of Korea and Japan. While slow to begin, this became captivating, mysterious and frightening as time began to run out for a man trying to return and a daughter trying to find herself. I loved the immersion in another culture, the multiple cultural perspectives and coming to understand the complication of borders, ethnicities, allegiances, and the creepy stealth of some nations and complete (or deliberate) ignorance of others.

Cover of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) by Kiran Desai (India) – I do love a good cross-cultural novel, and one that is in part set in India, by a known author, sounded promising. As soon as I saw the Booker longlist I knew I would be reading this, and I loved it. The story is about two young people who have just finished studying in the US, Sunny is working as a freelance journalist and Sonia is in a college library, looking for an internship. Their families have a connection but are no longer close, however a letter arrives suggesting marriage, to absolve a past discretion, but goes nowhere.

It is an interesting navigation of their young adult lives, where they struggle to cope with the freedom and direction their lives might take, now that they are living outside of their country and culture. Both must deal with challenging issues on their own, their families far away and ignorant of their dilemmas. On a trip home, the two cross paths, make a strong connection, only to diverge again. This is enough to ignite in the reader, a wish that they might meet again, though it is clear the timing had not been right.

I loved this immersive, meandering novel, the loneliness and confusion of the protagonists, the clash of cultures and past/present values, the defiance and stubbornness of each parent, the multi-generational threads as everyone is going through their transition and it’s a wild, contemporary ride to the end. Brilliant.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (US) – Nothing like a feel good novel to wrap up the end of the year. This is a charming book of letters by a dedicated 73 year old retired law clerk and correspondent who sits at her desk every morning to write letters, emails, notes, through which we come to learn all the issues she’s currently juggling and something of her stubborn, somewhat dogmatic attitude. It’s also an unlikely word-of-mouth book that is enjoying some success thanks to readers, not marketing hype.

It’s entertaining, has multiple engaging storylines and some of the letters contain excellent book recommendations, which is always fun for readers. There’s mystery, loss, relationship troubles, mother-daughter issues, potential love interest(s) and a tribute to the lost art of letter-writing. Loved it!

* * * * *

So that’s my Top 9 Fiction Reads for 2025, tomorrow I’ll share my Top 8 Non-Fiction Reads for 2025 and after that I’ll share my Top 7 Translated Reads of 2025.

Are any of these in your Top Reads of 2025? Let us know in the comments your thoughts, or share your favourite fiction read of 2025, I would love to know.

December 1, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

It has been twenty years since Kiran Desai published her Booker Prize winning The Inheritance of Loss, so this latest novel has been much anticipated by many.

It was one of two Booker shortlisted novels this year that I was interested to read, because of their cross-cultural settings, the other being Flashlight by Susan Choi, set in Japan, US and North Korea.

Character led New Generation Indian Drama

At 670 pages, I had to be sure about Desai’s novel before committing to read it, an immersive Indian family saga sounded promising, then the author’s intention to write ‘a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty’ sealed it for me.

It was everything I hoped and more. All the old fashioned values and dilemmas of an India of the past and then the mix of young people sent abroad for an American education, isolated from their home culture and influences, while both benefiting from, and coping with the effect of a western education and so-called freedoms as they try to find their place in the world.

We also bear witness to the imbalance in power in a co-dependent and coercive relationship of a manipulative and emotionally abusive man over a young woman, who struggles to see what is happening to her and yet knows it is not right.

The Loneliness of Winter in a Foreign Country

In this modern day Indian family chronicle, we meet aspiring novelist, freelance writer Sonia in the snowy mountains of Vermont, and Sunny a struggling journalist now in New York.

Unable to return home during the holidays, having been in America for three years and not returned to India for two, Sonia complains to her family.

“Lonely? Lonely?”

In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps, never to return, which was a kind of loneliness: but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals.

In Vermont working on campus in the library over the two month winter closure, with two foreign students, one day she encounters a much older man Ilan de Toorjen Foss, who invites her to dine, promises to find an internship for her. He takes something from her that becomes one of the core threads of the story, the thing that will bring Sonia and Sunny’s fates full circle.

Her colleagues in the library are suspicious.

“I still don’t understand who this person is and why he is here in the dead of winter. It doesn’t add up. Where is his family?”

The Jealous Confused Girlfriend

When Sunny’s American girlfriend Ulla opens a letter from his mother with a photo of Sonia inside, he tries to downplay the foreign custom it refers to. She is suspicious.

“There’s nothing sinister about the letter,” he said. “Everyone gets these at my age, forwarded by relatives, friends, people who’ve never set eyes on you – a great pile arrives when you finish college, and the flood continues until everyone is settled. Then there is a lull before they begin marrying off the progeny of these mishaps, each generation lesser than what came before, because what hope can you have from such a process?”

Sunny avoids answering his mother’s calls and now his girlfriend suspects this custom might be the real reason he is reluctant to tell his family about their relationship. He finds it increasingly difficult to navigate his relationship, discovering there are as many pressures and expectations, with little understanding of the rules. He seeks an escape.

An Arranged Marriage? Not Likely!

Neither Sonia or Sunny are thinking about marriage according to the cultural traditions of their parents generation; they are too swept up dealing with their current circumstances. The letters they received were a response to a letter in India, sent from one family to the other, suggesting a match, inferring but never outright stating, a kind of favour that might balance out an old grievance these families had faced a decade ago, after an investment turned sour.

It was essential to remain close to those who had caused you harm so that the ghost of guilt might breathe through their dreams, that their guilt might slowly mature to its fullest potential. Not that Dadaji had thought it through – it never worked to consciously plot, to crudely calculate – and he himself was astonished at the possibility of what was unfolding. Even now it would never do to name this liability. The Colonel would not allow his grandson to bear the burden of his grandfather’s mistake. Dadji and Ba may simply suggest a desirable match between the grandchildren, two America-educated individuals, two equals, two people who naturally belonged together because of where they came from and where they were going. Without either of them mentioning it, the obligation might be beautifully unravelled.

The intended match fizzles out without Sonia or Sunny meeting, neither are interested, both already in romantic connections they are attached to but not entirely happy in.

However their paths will cross, igniting intrigue, but again they separate, as they struggle to find their place in the world and in themselves and overcome the mistakes they have made on the way, which have nothing to do with each other.

He passed a young woman sitting cross-legged staring at the rain. By her side was a book. Because Sunny couldn’t abide passing a book whose title he could not read, he walked by again and saw she had a face planed like a leopard, long lips, and watchful eyes, hair in a single oiled braid, but he still couldn’t see the title. So he passed by again. And one more time before he detected it: Snow Country by Kawabata.

Ultimately the two young people flee their present and go into a period of self imposed reflection, Sonia retreating to her mother’s house in the mountains, where she has mystical revelations that she decides not to be frightened of, but to look for simpler meaning from; while Sunny finds solace in nature and human rhythms in a village on the coast of Mexico, blending in with locals and receiving a visit from his friend Satya who is having his own realisations, seeking apology and reconciliation.

There is so much to navigate and nothing mentioned gives anything away, just an idea of the journey these two will go on as they seek a solution to their loneliness, a confrontation with themselves, in various parts of the world.

A Cultural Coming of Age Youth’s Journeying

I was hoping for an immersive, character led Indian novel and this was everything I hoped for and more. It had all the old fashioned values and dilemmas of an India of the past and then the interesting blend of young people sent abroad for an education, isolated from their culture and influences, experimenting with the new and forbidden, benefiting from and coping with the effect of a western education and freedoms, while trying to understand themselves and their place in the world.

Though there were aspects that were deeply troubling, like the grooming of a young foreign student by a much older man, they are sadly relevant to the situation an isolated young woman without family around, might encounter abroad.

At the same time there were generational threads and mystical elements that disturb the equilibrium; there are parasitic entities met on their paths that cause them to learn, to suffer and grow, requiring surrender and courage. Everyone, young and old alike, must deal with their situation in order for any kind of balance to be regained.

I found the novel thoroughly entertaining and engaging, the mix of traditional and contemporary attitudes, the facing up to change and resistance against old roles. To a certain extent, as outsiders to the culture, we rely on authors to represent it authentically, but here we have characters that have been influenced and educated outside their own culture from within privileged families, which makes them neither one thing nor the other.

Loved all of it, did not want it to end, the ending was perfect.

Kiran Desai, Author

Kiran Desai portrait with her novel The Lonliness of Sonia and Sunny © Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation — Author Kiran Desai © Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi, India, was educated in India, England and the United States, and now lives in New York.

She is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over 22 countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.

In 2015, the Economic Times listed her as one of 20 most influential global Indian women.

In the past of my parents, and certainly my grandparents, an Indian love story would mostly be rooted in one community, one class, one religion, and often also one place. But a love story in today’s globalised world would likely wander in so many different directions. My characters consider: Why this person? Why not as easily someone else? Why here, not there? In the past people were always where they had to be. My indecisive lovers, Sonia and Sunny, meet and part across Europe, India and America, their idea of themselves turning ever more fluid.

November 28, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

A Roundup of Book Award Winners 2025

It’s nearing the end of the year and some of the book awards I have been following have made their announcements, while others like the Dublin Literary Award 2026 are sharing their nominations for next year.

Booker Prize Winner 2025

From the Booker shortlist of six novels, the prize went to Flesh by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, a novel that follows a man from adolescence to old age as he is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. It asks profound questions about what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

The judges chose it for its singularity and said:

‘At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.

‘I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.’

And this from Keiran Goddard at the Guardian:

‘There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.’

I haven’t read ‘Flesh‘ and I’m on the fence about it based on reviews I’ve read, the lack of interiority, the focus on toxic masculinity and comments on the base dialogue. I still remember the first time I heard about it on the Irish Women’s Summer Reading podcast live at Kildare Village, but I am yet to be convinced I would enjoy it and I am not curious enough to consider it for its “singularity“.

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Winner 2025

From their shortlist of six novels by women in translation that included works from French, Hungarian, Korean, Romanian and Swedish, the Warwick Prize this year went to :

And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström & Sigrid Rausing,

translated from Swedish by Sigrid Rausing

published by Granta.

This book is a memoir created from 13 handwritten notebooks that Johanna Ekström (1970-2022) asked her friend Sigrid Rausing to finish.

First published in Swedish in 2023, it has been described as a literary experiment, a continuation of 30 years of friendship, and a deep meditation on grief.

“Just as the end of life will take us into unknown territory, so this extraordinary book pioneers new ways of thinking, feeling and writing about losses of many kinds.

Sigrid Rausing’s completion of, and commentary on, her friend Johanna Ekström’s final notebooks is not just a poignant and powerful double memoir: it is a record of a distinguished writer’s last years and the friendship she inspired.

Its language, beautifully chosen and artfully translated, helps us confront and understand grief and absence. But it also permits us to celebrate a unique inner life of dreams and visions that now survives in memories, and words.”

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Highly Commended

The judges also highly commended:

Too Great A Sky, by Liliana Corobca,

translated from Romanian by Monica Cure

published by Seven Stories Press UK:

“This prose epic not only tells an astonishing, but largely forgotten, story of suffering and endurance amid the terrors of total war; Liliana Corobca also turns her historical research into the experience of Romanians deported by Soviet authorities from Bucovina to Kazakhstan into captivating fiction.

In Monica Cure’s immersive translation, the narrator’s voice seasons horror and upheaval with humour, resilience and folkloric charm as she recounts the ordeal of the deportees and the ways they survived it. This mighty, moving novel transforms fact into art, and brings ancient storytelling skills to bear on modern tragedies.”

Both these sound excellent and I’m definitely keen to read them, so watch this space for future reviews once I manage to get hold of copies. Ask your library to get these in, if they have a copy already, I’d love to hear what you think of them if you’re also interested to read them.

An Post Irish Book Awards 2025

I didn’t create a post this year for the Irish Book Awards but I like to read Irish literature, so I keep an eye on it, in particular fiction and memoir/biography.

Exclusively Irish, inclusive in every other sense, the An Post Irish Book Awards brings together the entire literary community – readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians to celebrate Irish writing.

A reminder of the shortlist for fiction, from which I have reviewed two. You can read the shortlists of the other prizes here.

Eason Novel of the Year shortlist 2025

Conversation with the Sea by Hugo Hamilton (Hachette Books Ireland)
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins)
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney (Harvill, Penguin)
Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell (Scribner Bools from Simon & Schuster)
The Benefactors by Wendy Erksine (Sceptre)
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr (Picador, Pan MacMillan)
The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill, Penguin)
Venetian Vespers by John Banville (Faber)

Eason Novel of the Year Winner 2025

Nesting by Rosisin O'Donnell longlisted for Womens Prize fiction 2025 Reading Ireland Month

The winner of the novel of the year went to:

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell

a story of one woman’s escape from a coercive relationship and the challenges faced to stay away, while trying against the odds to build a new life.

Two of the shortlisted authors also won elsewhere.

Joseph O’Connor’s The Ghosts of Rome won the people’s choice, The Last Word Listener’s Choice Award and Elaine Feeney took home The Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year Award.

The popular fiction award went to Celia Ahearn’s Paper Heart, and The Book Centre Crime Fiction award went to It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara.

Non-Fiction Awards

The Dubray Biography of the Year went to A Time for Truth: My Father Jason and My Search for Justice and Healing by Sarah Corbett Lynch and the nonfiction award went to Deadly Silence: A Sister’s Battle to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of Clodagh and Her Sons by Alan Hawe by Jacqueline Connolly & Kathryn Rogers.

Lots to consider here for next year’s Reading Irish Month in March 2026.

Have you read any of the above prize winners?

November 18, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards

Mothers in Literature

I had long wished to read Yvvette Edwards second novel, The Mother (2016) after very much enjoying her Booker longlisted A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011). I decided to read it alongside two novels on my shelf with similar themes of the bonds, burdens and breakthroughs of motherhood.

The three novels I chose are set in different countries and contexts: The Mother by Yvvette Edwards (UK) is set in London’s Caribbean community, Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona is set in apartheid-era South Africa, and The Mothers by Brit Bennett is set in contemporary Black America.

Sindiwe Magona has written numerous novels; however I have read and reviewed her autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992), while Brit Bennett is well known for her novel that addresses the theme of passing, The Vanishing Half (2020).

The Complexity of Motherhood

All three novels expose motherhood as fraught with social pressure, moral judgment, and emotional complexity. Despite the different settings, they collectively form a global conversation about motherhood, resilience, and the human cost of structural and racial inequality.

3 novels of mothers and motherhooh The Mother Yvvette Edwards Mother to Mother Sindiwe Magona The Mothers Brit Bennett

In The Mother, Marcia grapples with grief and guilt after the murder of her son.

In Mother to Mother, Mandisa reflects on her life while writing to the mother of the girl her son has murdered.

And The Mothers, focuses on young women (and a collective “we” voice of church “mothers”) navigating the expectations of womanhood, including unwanted pregnancy.

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards

The Mother is the story of a mother’s struggle to come to terms with understanding her teenage son’s violent death, it is both a courtroom drama following the murder of Marcia and Lloydie’s 16-year-old son Ryan and a story of transformation and healing through grief.

I used to be good at making decisions, took it for granted completely, imagined it was one of those things that because I’d always been good at it, I would continue to be good at it, and then something like what happened to Ryan comes along and you realise some things are just temporary gifts granted for part of your life only, like the headful of hair you imagined would be yours forever that you went to sleep with one night and as usual but woke the following morning to find gone, clean gone.

Suffering Together, Drifting Apart – the Complexity of Grief

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards courtroom drama in London youth stabbing gang culture

Marcia wants to be present every day at court, her husband Lloydie does not. Increasingly emotionally estranged, she does not understand what he does all day, where he goes. Their habits are changing and they seem to be leaving each other behind, dealing with the loss in completely different ways, on their own.

Lloydie is putting my cup of tea on the side when I return to the bedroom. He looks slightly sheepish, is probably annoyed with himself for the mistiming that has meant he has found himself alone with me when we are both awake and alert. He looks at me without speaking.

‘Aren’t you going to ask how it went?’ I say.

It’s not the question I intended; too in-your-face, accusatory. I didn’t want to start the discussion here but it’s out now, I can’t take it back.

His tone is dutiful. ‘How did it go?’

‘It was hard. Listening. Seeing that boy, his mother. Very hard.’

The Need to Understand

Marci is determined to be present every day, to understand why this happened and comes to realise that there may be things about her son that she did not know.

Understanding has been my problem from the start. How is it possible that my son was doing all the right things, that as parents, Lloydie and I, we were doing all the right things, and yet still Ryan is dead?

The novel follows the case and outside the court other events begin to shed light on the situation, Marcia’s beliefs and assumptions are challenged. In her need to know, she becomes reckless.

She observes the boy who is being charged, his fixed stare and has already decided his fate.

…he stares ahead as if it is all beneath him, and as usual I find it unnerving. I have to say that single quality in him is enough to convince me that he did it, that he’s guilty because he has something in his aura of the type of person who could kill someone at six thirty, then stroll home, have dinner and a hot bath, followed by an early night of unbroken sleep.

Edwards is adept at tapping into the realms of Ryan’s peers and the insidious, threatening world of youth gang culture, which comes into full view through he character of Sweetie, the girl caught between the earnest world of Ryan and the manipulative obedience she has to Tyson Manley and his type.

It is a thought provoking story of complicated parenting and motherhood highlighting effects of judgment, truth seeking, and the social forces that shape personal and family outcomes, while reflecting on the particular role of mother. Motherhood becomes a lifelong, consuming identity, the loss of a child, in this case, destabilising her sense of self.

Author, Yvvette Edwards

Yvvette Edwards is a British East Londoner of Montserratian origin and author of two novels, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011) nominated for The Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Mother (2016). Her short stories have been published in anthologies and broadcast on radio.

She is interested in writing that challenges the single narrative, giving voice to characters who are absent or under-represented in contemporary fiction.

An Upcoming Novel in March 2026

Good Good Loving, Yvvette Edwards first book in almost a decade, will be published in March 2026 by Virago. The synopsis reads:

Good Good Loving Yvvette Edwards a multi-generational British-Caribbean family across five decades

“Ellen’s big, beautiful family are gathered around her hospital bed as she prepares to slip away… her children have chosen now of all times to have a never-ending discussion about all her failings. Every single tiny thing they think she’s done wrong over the years – and the one big thing too. Even after everything, after all the sacrifices Ellen has made for every last ungrateful one of them, they still all take their father’s side. If only they knew the whole story.

“Moving backwards in time through all the decisive moments that have shaped Ellen’s life – the disasters, celebrations and surprises, the revelations, confrontations and betrayals – Good Good Loving is the vibrant story of a multi-generational British-Caribbean family across five decades.”

Next up is Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother :

November 8, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Flashlight by Susan Choi

As I mentioned in the Booker Prize shortlist post, this is one of the two shortlisted novels I’m reading before the winner announcement on Nov 10.

Cross Cultural Relationships, Identity and Belonging

Flashlight interested me because it is a portrayal of a cross-cultural marriage and family that highlights the tensions between adults with different backgrounds and expectations, coping within one culture and the way a child of that union navigates both her life and her parents, when she comes from them both.

The novel begins with a scene plucked from the middle of the story, when ten year old Louisa and her father Serk are out for a walk in the early evening, in a coastal town in Japan.

Serk was born in Japan to Korean parents and while furthering his education in America, met Louise’s mother Anne. The family are in Japan on a one year secondment from his American university.

Hours later, Louisa is found washed up on the beach and her father is missing, presumed drowned.

Finding One’s Place Nowhere

The story then returns to the beginning, where we learn of the childhoods and upbringing of Serk in Japan and Anne in America, of his attachment to Japan and his success in school, while his family long to return to Korea (having not told him earlier where they were from) and wish their children to attend another school where they can learn about their culture and identity.

To learn it was not Japanese but Korean was so profoundly disorienting that the greater discovery, that he himself was Korean, was for the moment secondary.

As Serk matures, he comes to understand the ambiguous nature of nationality and belonging, of being caught between two nations, perceived and treated as an outsider by both of them; American thus becomes both an escape and an even greater frustration.

…disillusioned as he was, when his parents decided to abandon Japan he was dumbfounded.

The first half of the novel, prior to his disappearance has the feel of domestic fiction as the family navigate the intimate dramas of their lives and find their way.

Both Serk and Anne have withheld parts of their lives from each other and this adds tension to their marriage, as these things are sensed but unknown, or threaten to become visible, ultimately undermining their relationship.

That fall, Serk’s college announced it would send a member of its history department as a visiting professor to Japan, starting the following April. Before the history professor was chosen, Serk was asked if he would like to be considered and said he would not.

Louisa becomes partially aware of their secrets, adding to her own confusion and struggle to find a sense of belonging.

When Louisa hated her mother, it was because the thought of her caused her so much pain.

When she hated her father, it was because she was conscious of emulating his remoteness.

Shattered Lives Separate

In the second half of the novel, the family is no longer a cohesive unit, their lives diverge and chapters are then told from each character’s separate location and perspective. The pace changes, an element of mystery appears in the timeline and there was such a feeling of a true-crime element, that I paused reading and checked the back of the book for a bibliography. Sure enough, there are 15 works of fiction and non-fiction referenced, very revealing.

What Really Happened to the Disappeared

As the mystery of what happpened to Serk is revealed, other characters appear who are searching for their own disappeared and thus stories of a similar nature are discovered, told with such detail that they seemed as though true.

So while the novel continues, it also provides an insight into historical tensions between Japan and North Korea and the untold stories of a number of families whose tales of missing members of their family were ignored and disbelieved until subsequently proven to be true.

I don’t want to reveal too much more than what you can read in the blurb, because encountering the story is all the better for not knowing. Not everything that occurs is written, as each character chapter ends, we often know what is to be revealed and we fill that in ourselves, creating connections as the narrative leaps forward from one character to the next.

Perhaps no one but Anne, who had lived with him and tried for so long, could understand how impossible Serk made it to know the least thing about him. A constant wretched privacy had radiated from him, more powerful and more wretched the nearer you got.

An Illuminating Text

Flashlight was so many things, a complex story of a multi cultural family, the relinquishment of a child, four people whose lives came together then split apart, who we continue to observe, often decades later. It explores the effect on each person in the family of their culturally diverse pasts, their birth circumstance and the geographic moves they make that shift perceptions of who they are.

It exposes the cruelties of nations, abuses of humankind, the determination of those who seek the truth, the perseverance of those who want to bring justice and the importance of closure, of being present even when someone seems beyond comprehension.

What an effort to bring all that together and create a novel that traversed so many elements of the cross cultural family, the immigrant life, the (false) allure of the return, lost family members and the dangers of trying to find them. I was reminded a little of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, but this is much less introspective and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, but with a different focus on aspects of history & family predicaments.

This was such an eye opening, thought provoking read that felt like reading two novels, the first half interesting but mundane and predictable, the second half mysterious, disconcerting and dangerous. For me it started a little slowly and almost methodically and then suddenly you become aware of a much greater story within which this narrative sits, and then it became completely absorbing and I didn’t want to put it down.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Susan Choi

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Susan Choi is the author of six novels.

Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction – and was a US bestseller.

Her sixth novel, Flashlight, began as a short story in the New Yorker in 2020, and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

November 3, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Booker Prize Shortlist 2025

The winner of the Booker Prize 2005 will be announced on Monday November 10. I only read one novel from the longlist, Love Forms by Trinidad and Tobagan author Claire Adam (my review here). Initially, I perceived on the list as being too clever with the form, even if that is a characteristic of literary fiction, but then I saw two novels that fit my own preference, written by women, about lesser known cultures.

Below is a reminder of the six books on the shortlist being considered for the prize with a quote from the author and another from the judges answering different questions about each novel. You can read more interesting facts about the shortlisted authors here.

In the coming days I’ll share my thoughts on the two that I am reading, Flashlight by Susan Choi (my review here) and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (my review here).

The Booker Shortlist 2025

Penned in English, these shortlisted books are worldly in settings and universal in their themes, often featuring characters living outside their familiar communities and cultures, navigating a diverse set of eye-opening challenges, exposing aspects of history and geopolitical issues from Hungary to Japan, from Venice to New York, from India to England’s West Country.

If you click on the title of the book, you can read an extract from the novel:

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (India)

‘I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty’

– The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the epic tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is said to be the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?

Its rich intricacies and the sheer bounty each page offers. Inter-generational family saga, sharp humour, poignant love story, state-of-the-nation novel, this book has it all. As a result, reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an immersive, wonderful experience.

Flashlight by Susan Choi (US)

‘Reading a great book feels like being dropped onto an alien planet’

– Flashlight moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, to two children trying to forge their own identities, and an eye-opening venture into the fate of those returned to North Korea, an astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of 20th-century history.

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love? 

The scale of it, and the life-spanning trajectories of these characters of whom we get such intimate knowledge: all their drama and pain and, very occasionally, their joy. We found Flashlight to be one of those books that completely dominates your thoughts while you’re reading it.

Audition by Katie Kitamura (US)

‘As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads’

– An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before? 

Yes, the way Kitamura transitions between supposed reality – modern-day Manhattan – and something deeper and stranger, is bracing. She doesn’t hand-hold or explain, which some might see as a kind of hostility towards the reader. We saw it as a marker of trust.

This is a very controlled performance of a book that intentionally leaves a lot open to interpretation. We think readers will love finding others who’ve read it and talking to them about what it all might mean.

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (US)

‘I wanted to write about a certain period of family life coming to an end’

– An unforgettable road trip of a novel about a middle-aged academic whose marriage, career and body are failing him. Pitch perfect, quietly exhilarating and moving, The Rest of Our Lives is a novel about family, marriage and those moments which may come to define us.

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?

Tom is not a literary king – he’s a dad and basketball enthusiast. We think readers will admire and enjoy high-concept analysis recounted by a ridiculously relatable narrator.

The star of this novel is Tom’s voice: the lodestar and the ‘why now’. He is a democratic guide, he’s delightfully embarrassed, and he is as observant as he is negligent. But what’s most impressive is Markovits’ dedication to Tom as an averagely flawed human. Tom makes bad jokes, he’s a pushover, and it’s difficult to imagine being taken with him in person.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (UK)

‘I’ll write anywhere, with anything, on anything’

The Land in Winter Andrew Miller Booker Prize 2025

– A masterful, page-turning examination of the minutiae of life and a dazzling chronicle of the human heart. As the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?

The novel is set during the harsh winter of 1962-63 and, given what’s been happening to the weather since then, a harsh winter would be reassuring. But the novel is about the tensions within marriage and other relationships and those tensions are the same today as they were back then. How to live: that’s the big human issue and it forms the spine of the book.

Flesh by David Szalay (Hungary-UK)

‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world’

– A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?

Flesh is a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it, but it is also an absolute page-turner. It’s nearly impossible to put down. The emotional detachment of the main character, István, is sustained by the tremendous movement of the plot. The pace of this novel speaks to one of the greater themes; the detachment of our bodies from our decisions.

* * * * * *

Have you read any of these novels from the shortlist? Do you have a favourite to win?

October 23, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (Hungary) tr. George Szirtes

A few catch up reviews from August 2025’s Women in Translation month. I realised I’ve mentioned them elsewhere but not here. The link above has a summary of all the novels I read during #WITMonth with links to reviews. So many of them were excellent 5 star reads, the 3 Italian novels, the Mexican, French.

Hungarian Literature in Translation

Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad (2014), translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes was originally published in Hungary in 1963 and brought to English fifty years later in 2014. She was the most translated Hungarian author, brought back to popularity thanks to Len Rix’s translations of her novels Abigail (2020) and The Door (2006) and Katalin street (2017).

It is the story of traditional villager Ettie and her daughter Iza, who lives in Budapest and the sequence of events in the wake of the death of Ettie’s husband Vince, when the daughter swiftly moves her mother away from the countryside and her familiar community to the city, where everything will be taken care of.

The news arrived just as she was toasting bread.

Three years earlier Iza had sent them a clever little machine that plugged into the wall and made the bread come out a pale pink; she’d turned the contraption this way and that, examined it for a while, then stowed it on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, never to use it again.

Thrust into a Modern Era

Ettie’s grief finds no solace in the new situation, baffled by the ways of her daughter and the city, where she struggles to find her place or role to assuage her loss. Even getting outside for fresh air becomes a source of anxiety due to the confusion of not knowing the area, the traffic, the transport system. Teréz who cooks, is hostile doesn’t want her in the kitchen or cleaning, no one wants her old-fashioned coffee or help.

She understood how an old woman rapidly heading towards eighty, who had spent all her life on firm ground, coping with straight forward problems, would now feel as though her life were hanging by a thread, and she also understood the bitterness she must be feeling, a bitterness she had never articulated in words that must have been there all the time: she was, after all, an old but still active woman, and she was in mourning. Having established the nature of their relationship, Teréz wanted to show her some tenderness without endangering her own importance and position.

How Not to Age Gracefully

Written in four parts, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, the narrative hops back and forth from present to past as we grow to understand the family, their relationships and the great divide between their generations and the lives they lead.

The story moves slowly through Vince’s illness and past and then speeds up with his demise as Ettie is literally thrust into a new era.

She was right, she was always right, it was just that old people grow fond of things that mean much more to them than the young.

A Formidable Daughter

Iza is an adept busy Doctor, divorced, childless, has a night companion and is extremely independent. Employing teréz to take care of all her domestic arrangements, she wants her mother to be looked after and not to have to do a thing, believing she should appreciate that.

One activity at a time she tries to find her role, only to be continuously rebuffed. Everything is taken care of and the effect as she pulls back from one potential helpful chore after the other is a slow deterioration of all ‘joie de vivre’. Her daughter’s efficiency removes all chance of Ettie helping out and efforts to do so, create more problems, further undermining the elderly mother’s sense of well-being.

She felt as if some elemental blow had destroyed everything around her and that only now did she really know what it was to be a widow, someone absolutely abandoned.

Return to One’s Roots

book cover of Magda Szabo's Iza's Ballad Hungarian literature in translation

When she hears the headstone is ready for placement, Ettie makes plans for her return. It is quite a revelation to her for everything to feel so familiar and so strange at the same time. But her time away has hastened her decline and things don’t go as smoothly as she would have liked.

There’s so much more to the story and the backstory of the character’s that leads them to the predicament they are in by the time Ettie reaches widowhood. It’s an incredibly well portrayed depiction of the sudden transition of the aging mother from her simple village home to the modern convenience of her daughter’s third floor apartment in Budapest, and the effect that removing an elderly person from their familiar environment and from the process of transitioning can have.

Thought provoking and reflective, with an element of tension as the status quo can not be supported, it’s an excellent novel that captures an important and little acknowledged societal shift, of a dying era and of interesting mother daughter power dynamics.

Have you read any good Hungarian novels?

Author, Magda Szabó

Hungarian novelist, essayist, poet and literary translator Magda Szabó was born in Debrecen, Austria–Hungary in 1917 and died in 2007. She began her literary career as a poet and disappeared from the publishing scene in the 1950’s for political reasons, making a living teaching and translating from French to English.

She began writing novels and in 1978 was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Her novel The Door won the Prix Feminina Etranger in France and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and made into a film starring Helen Mirren.

She lived a long, eventful life decorated with many outstanding achievements in the field of literature, with several of her books being translated into more than 40 languages.

October 19, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidad & Tobago)

I first heard this recommended on the Irish Times Women’s podcast summer reads of 2025 and shortly after that it was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. It didn’t make the shortlist, but it was the novel I was most drawn to, given the adoption theme, but coming from a different culture than that we usually hear from.

Love

forms in the human body

– Louise Glück ‘The Fortress’

Forced Relinquishment Across Seas

Love FOrms by Claire Adams longlisted Booker Prize 2025 Trindad & Tobago

A 16 year old living in relative privilege in Trinidad, has one crazy night out at carnival and months later is clandestinely bundled into various transportations, made to wait at different locations, never told where she is going, crossing the water to a hideaway in neighbouring Venezuela, where she will stay a while, give birth to her baby and return alone.

It was my father who made the arrangements. My uncle helped, since he lived down south, where all this kind of business is carried out. I’m talking south-south : down past the airport, past the swamp, past the oilfields, everything. Way down at the bottom of the island, down where Columbus landed, long ago.

Years later, 58 years old, living alone in London, unable to pick up her career in medicine, two grown sons, divorced, her family still in Trinidad, she begins to search for her lost daughter, with very little knowledge, except that memory of the trip in the dark. The rest must be imagined.

I’ve spent many hours trawling through images online, trying to find this place again.But Venezuela is a big country…Even now, over forty years later, I still don’t know exactly where I was.

Gone But Never Forgotten

The novel explores a certain way of living in Trinidad, a daughter made to feel shame, an event unspoken of for more than a decade, a self-exile imposed. A child never forgotten, forever part of her, out of reach.

Over the years, I’ve come across a few photos in magazines and newspapers that I’ve cut out and kept, because they look the way I imagine her to look. I have them in different ages.

Though she maintains contact with her family, there is more than just physical distance between them. There’s a loss of intimacy, of trust, a love that overnight became conditional, an imposed silence that is easier to bear from afar.

I do love my mother dearly, despite everything, but this particular issue is fraught for us. If she and I were to start talking, and I were to finally tell her the honest truth about everything I’ve felt over these past forty years? Well, I couldn’t do something like that – not now, at her stage of life.

There’s A Community Out There

Not until she begins her search and becomes familiar with the experiences of others like her, of children like the one she abandoned, does she begin to be able to understand what it is she has been feeling, a life long loss, momentarily offered the promise of being filled, as each potential contact (a woman her daughter’s age searching for their mother) raises that hope. She confides in a work colleague, a safe stranger.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ I said. ‘But I guess, why not. Another person has been in touch. A girl. I mean, a woman. From the websites. As a possible, you know. Match.

He was watching me closely, and I tried to take on the right manner. Steady and controlled, hopeful but in a measured way. With a hint of detachment, as if I were talking about something at a much greater remove, of academic interest. I said she was in Italy, a town in the north, and that she was a professional person, a biochemist with a pharmaceutical company.

This was a compelling read that would create interesting discussions, with its deeply flawed characters, many terribly inhumane behaviours and the life long wounding adults commit, who care more for status and reputation than the damage heaped on women and children for being in the too common situation of being pregnant, or birthed, unwanted. It’s a conversation and narrative that has for too long been dominated by one side, so it is good to see it being explored through fiction.

This kind of story comes in so many varieties and though this one is unique, again it is driven by the shame and blame of young women, without consideration for those whose consent is never given, those future adults severed from the natural maternal bond and their lineage, conditioned into false belonging.

On the return journey, in the jeep and then in the dented, rattling airplane, I felt as if something had changed, although I couldn’t, at that stage, have fully articulated what it was. Pieces were beginning to settle in new patterns. Maybe my story wasn’t: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe its: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost.

One of the most hopeful parts of this novel for me, was the knowledge that this character and this author, read the forums and the stories of the many humans born into this paradigm who write of their shared, common experience of how that separation affects a child, their life, their future relationships, which helps dispel the myth, that it’s a good or right thing to do, to sever any baby from its mother.

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Last year, I read the book Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson, a non fiction work that was the result of ten years of interviews, research and analysis of young women who had given up their babies, looking back at the impact of those decisions.

If you have any interest in the subject of family preservation, and creating conditions where families are supported not separated, read this. If you want to know the truth behind the experience of relinquishing a child (a lifelong trauma), not to mention the impact that has on the child (loving family or not), become more well informed by reading this excellent work.

Claire Adam, Author

Novelist Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad. She was educated in the United States, where she studied Physics at Brown University, and now lives in London with her husband and two children.

Her first novel, Golden Child, published in 2019, won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the McKitterick Prize, the Authors Club Best First Novel Award and was named one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Changed the World’. Adam’s second novel, Love Forms, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.

I wanted to explore the bond between mothers and their children. On one hand, it’s the most ordinary, mundane, taken-for-granted thing in the world… on the other hand, it’s deeply mysterious. In the case of a mother and child who’ve been separated since birth, for example, often there is a pull towards each other that lasts a whole lifetime. These are people who don’t know each other, who’ve basically never ‘met’ – and yet they yearn to be together. Why is that? Claire Adam

A Profound Dedication

10 Minutes 38 Seconds

A Post Death Structure

Friends on a Mission

A Clever Structure Dulls Character Recall

Further Reading

Author Elif Shafak

An Irish Millennial Perspective

Grief As a Turning and Growth Point

Unresolved Mother Son Issues

Millennial Self-Consciousness and Entangled Love Lives

Using Voice Stylistically to Create Power Dynamics

A Long Positional Game

Further Reading

Author Sally Rooney

One Outstanding Read of 2025

Outstanding Read Runner Up 2025

Top Fiction

Character led New Generation Indian Drama

The Loneliness of Winter in a Foreign Country

The Jealous Confused Girlfriend

An Arranged Marriage? Not Likely!

A Cultural Coming of Age Youth’s Journeying

Further Reading

Kiran Desai, Author

Booker Prize Winner 2025

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Winner 2025

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Highly Commended

An Post Irish Book Awards 2025

Eason Novel of the Year shortlist 2025

Eason Novel of the Year Winner 2025

Non-Fiction Awards

Mothers in Literature

The Complexity of Motherhood

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards

Suffering Together, Drifting Apart – the Complexity of Grief

The Need to Understand

Author, Yvvette Edwards

An Upcoming Novel in March 2026

Cross Cultural Relationships, Identity and Belonging

Finding One’s Place Nowhere

Shattered Lives Separate

What Really Happened to the Disappeared

An Illuminating Text

Further Reading

Author, Susan Choi

The Booker Shortlist 2025

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (India)

Flashlight by Susan Choi (US)

Audition by Katie Kitamura (US)

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (US)

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (UK)

Flesh by David Szalay (Hungary-UK)

Hungarian Literature in Translation

Thrust into a Modern Era

How Not to Age Gracefully

A Formidable Daughter

Return to One’s Roots

Further Reading

Author, Magda Szabó

Forced Relinquishment Across Seas

Gone But Never Forgotten

There’s A Community Out There

Further Reading

Claire Adam, Author