Sinéad Gleeson’s blog
With a title as provocative, and contradictory, as Rape: A Love Story, Joyce Carol Oates sets herself a difficult task. How do you write about the experience of rape, and how, in any sense, can it be about love? It’s worth pointing out that although the novel is fiction, for thousands of women there will […]
John Banville’s reputation as a writer of literary fiction sometimes puts potential readers off, but in The Book of Evidence, Sinéad Gleeson discovers a wholly unconventional thriller based on a real story.
While many book lovers know who John Banville is, quite a lot haven’t read any of his work. The reasons are possibly that […]
Sinead Gleeson finds something familiar in the self-satisfied, unfulfilled smugness in the protaganist of John Banville’s The Sea.
One of the first things that strikes the reader upon starting ‘The Sea’ is the sense of familiarity on encountering its protagonist Max Morden. John Banville’s characters are certainly distinct from one another but occupy […]
When one of my favourite writers, Virginia Woolf said: “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of”, I couldn’t help my curiosity about Katherine Mansfield. Finally, the opportunity to read her work arrived and I’m sorry I’ve waited so long to discover it. Mansfield has long occupied a […]
The month of May is traditionally associated with all sorts of images: the beginnings of summer; Maypoles, those symbols of phallic fertility; and on May 1st, international workers day. That Orwell was an ardent socialist is not in doubt and so many of his characters trundle along bearing the yoke of worker oppression. Many of […]
In 2004, Virago reissued most of Molly Keane’s back catalogue to coincide with the centenary of her birth. The introductions to three of them - Good Behaviour, Loving and Giving and Time After Time - are written by Marian Keyes, Michèle Roberts and Emma Donoghue respectively. If the quality of writer Keane has influenced is […]
In life as in art, sometimes the most familiar or everyday things can become terrifying in their ordinariness. In his studies of neurosis and hysteria, Freud invented a new word - “unheimlich”. While it’s difficult to translate specifically, (’unhome-like’, ‘unnative’), it refers to a sense of the uncanny, that is deriving terror or fear from […]
When Kitchen was published in 1987, it was regarded as a radical new addition to the canon of Japanese writing. The fact that it was written by a woman, and a young woman at that, made the book even more of a talking point. In terms of writing from the Orient, it wasn’t like anything […]
When E. Annie Proulx describes Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist as “both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life”, we’re not quite expecting what comes next. These weather-beaten men of the land meet one summer guarding sheep on the remote Brokeback Mountain - and fall in love.
This short novella explores the kind of love […]
Based on the life of a real courtesan of the ninth century Tang dynasty in China, Justin Hill brings Lily Yu to life in her various incarnations and examines the fate of women in China over one thousand years ago.
When Scholar Yu proclaims: “All worry in life begins from learning to read and write” to […]
Bombarded with tales of repression under Mao, ‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse’ refreshingly breathes life back into representations of modern China.
In recent years, the book market has been flooded with Oriental tomes detailing life in pre-Revolution China. Works like ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and ‘Wild Swans’ painted portraits of Chinese womanhood that gripped the […]
The subject of Matthew Sturgis’ first biography was Aubrey Beardsley who died aged 25. This time the author has gone to the other end of the age spectrum with a book about the grand old man of English painting, Walter Sickert, who lived to be 82. It’s a massive tome to say the least but, […]