A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki – review

If a Japanese-American writer who is also a Zen Buddhist priest wrote a post-Japanese tsunami novel, what themes might you imagine she would address? Biculturalism, water, death, memory, the female predicament, conscience, the nature of time and tide? Tick. All there. Throw in the second world war, the reader-writer relationship, depression, ecological collapse, suicide, origami, a 105-year-old anarchist nun and a schoolgirl’s soiled knickers, and you have Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for the Time Being.

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Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Climate change: the spectre hanging over every child, is the single most urgent issue of our times – and a challenge to any novelist. But how to write fiction about the Earth’s storm-filled future without a whiff of the pulpit?

Barbara Kingsolver’s paradoxical solution is to set her story on a sheep farm in the depressed Bible Belt. By recruiting traditional images of Heaven, Hell and sacrificial lambs to convey the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species, the repercussions of man-made disaster lie firmly where they belong: in moral territory.

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Galore by Michael Crummey – review

“Newfoundland seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real,” notes an American doctor when he first encounters the remote settlement of Paradise Deep.

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