Fiction

Story by story, what emerges is a belonging to Country, one which is grounded in knowing and in knowledge.

6 JANUARY 2021. A nondescript room in the US Capitol Building. A Confederate flag is planted in a bin in the corner. Beside it is the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three horizontal red stripes on a yellow field. Three young men stand around a book on the floor. They each have their phones out, cameras facing each other.

There isn’t a neat ending to The Gaps, for a pat resolution would go against the grain of the book.

You could back-engineer any number of essays using these keywords: self-aware, self-loathing, self-perception, millennial, narcissism, white woman, privilege, social media, Brooklyn, Trump, Twitter, irony, online, extremely online, internet.

In the concrete, mixed realities we daily inhabit, and in hybridised writings like Cusk’s, taking the fiction out of auto and the auto out of fiction is like trying to take chocolate out of chocolate cake.

Róisín’s re-writing of the perpetual victim back into responsible and efficacious personhood is the resounding accomplishment of this novel.

By having Tussaud pit her wits against men determined to sideline or outmanoeuvre her, Lyons-Lee has herself fashioned a protagonist as wily as any conjurer.

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.