Category: Book of the Week

Anita Shreve is an author who has featured here on The Steady Read, albeit quite a while back. She was an author who I took a spontaneous plunge on when seeing many of her works in a second-hand bookshop for as little as fifty pence. Although I have only read one of her novels, and…

Sayaka Murata is an author I have previously enjoyed, primarily due to her quirky way of writing, as well as imbuing some black humour into the story. For that reason, I have kept Life Ceremony in mind since I want to enjoy more of the author’s simple, but amusing, way of writing. Unlike the last…

Modern novels can be tricky. They just don’t seem to hold as well as the classics. In fact, most modern novels that perform well are often partially, or sometimes wholly, set in a pre-2000s world. Contrastingly, and perhaps daringly, Jem Calder’s short story collection Reward System places itself right in the real-world 2020s. Through the…

Having read Mr Salary and enjoyed it for an hour or so, I really have taken a greater interest in the various Faber Stories titles. On that note, and particularly because it has a cool-looking cover, Milan Kundera’s Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead caught my eye. In essence, this book…

If you’re in any way interested in reading, then I’m certain you’ve either seen an advertisement, or perhaps have even already read, Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel A Little Life. This lengthy novel is ultimately a story about friendship, companionship, brotherly love, and four male classmate’s journeys through life in America. Based on that, you would…

Having recently watched the film (after promising myself that I would first read the book), Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club has moved greatly up my TBR list. In essence, Fight Club is a somewhat satirical novel aiming to point out the feminisation of masculinity towards the latter decades of the twentieth century, particularly within Generation X….

Coming of age stories are ripe for intense, passionate, and empowering narratives — hence why Réjean Ducharme’s novel Swallowed caught my eye. Published in the 1960s, Ducharme’s novel follows a young girl and her brother who are stuck on a secluded island with an overly-affectionate and suffocating mother. As the daughter grapples with her own…

Some books are just… interesting. There is often no other word for it than ‘interesting’, because they pique our interest. One novel that I can only use the descriptor ‘interesting’ for is Butter by Asako Yuzuki—especially because it is loosely based on a true story. Butter follows a serial killer, and gourmet cook, who is…

Debuts are always interesting, especially when the work itself is also unique or daring in some way. An Yu’s debut novel Braised Pork seems to garner a lot of praise for its originality, which makes it naturally alluring to many readers (myself included). The story is set in Beijing and follows a Chinese writer as…

Having read and reviewed her three major works, it is apparent that I am fond of Mieko Kawakami, especially her novella Heaven. So I really should be picking up her shortest translated work, Ms Ice Sandwich. From what I can understand from the blurb, it is a short and funny novella about a young man’s…