Gill Hornby
Family Fortunes
‘We think we know the ones we love’ is how Andrew Sean Greer opens this anatomy of an American marriage. The narrator is little Pearlie Cook, the wife of handsome Holland Cook. She is doing her darndest to create a happy home in 1950s San Francisco, where she lives beneath the fog that bedevilled the bay area back then. She is coping with the aftermath of the Second World War, and its heroes who have been returned to their families, feted but maimed. The beginnings of the Cold War swirl around her, with its terror of enemies everywhere. When she receives a visit from her husband’s old army friend, it is as if an earthquake has shaken her world.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish