Anne Chisholm
Trial by Fire
‘Everyone’, says the narrator’s mother halfway through this novel, ‘loses a best friend at some point.’ The American writer Claire Messud’s new book is an exceptionally well-written and emotionally powerful account of one such loss, in which the intense friendship between two prepubescent girls fails as they move from the clarity of childhood towards the uncertainties and dangers of adolescence. Messud, as it happens, was an early and passionate admirer of Elena Ferrante’s sequence of novels about how such friendships can mark women for life. It is hard not to see this book as an act of homage.
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
Only the Summer double issue (July/August) of @Lit_Review Lots of great summer reading.
'Like many a subsequent empire, Rome had a highly ambivalent relationship with the outsiders it needed to fuel its commerce, stock its slave markets and man its armies.'
@PParkerAuthor on the rise and fall of Alaric the Goth.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-barbarian-at-the-gate @douglasboin
'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hull-revisited