BBC :
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Launched late in the year to the feverish fan hoards was the fourth instalment in the so-called “Rooneyverse”. In a slight departure from the norm, Intermezzo’s protagonists are two men: Peter, 32, a talented but troubled barrister, and his 22-year-old chess-prodigy brother, Ivan, both working through grief and family tensions following their father’s recent death. Elsewhere, however, there were plenty of Rooney’s familiar beats to be enjoyed – tangled relationships, frequent sex, philosophical debates and deceptively simple but assured prose. “Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful” writes The Observer, “a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.” Its review concludes by asking: “Is there a better novelist at work right now?” While The New York Times’ critic was enchanted, writing: “Intermezzo is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream. Yes, please, waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft-jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old-school and delicious.” (RL)
Flint Kill Creek by Joyce Carol Oates
If you like your fiction noirish and nerve-shredding, look no further than the latest offering from US literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 60 novels. In Flint Kill Creek, her characters face various macabre situations within a collection of a dozen short stories, with titles including Bone Marrow Doner, The Phlebotomist and Happy Christmas. It is a “grimly satisfying” collection of tales, says Publishers Week. “In each case, Oates’s prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid.” The protagonists of each tale are bewildered by what is happening around them, thrown off balance, and face chilling, unhappy outcomes. “Yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words,” says the New York Journal of Books, “readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in Flint Kill Creek are unforgettable – although many may wish they could forget.” (LB)
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
“From a tale of great pain” The New Yorker writes of Small Rain: “… a rare kind of story – it becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love, ordinary happiness.” The US writer Garth Greenwell is known for his first two novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), and as a great writer of bodies and sex. With Small Rain, he turns his attentions to another corporeal concern – that of illness and pain. The novel centres on a poet, who is struck down one day with a searing pain and near-fatal illness that confines him first to the ER and then the ICU, as the Covid-19 pandemic rages.
