The novel is set in 2015-2016, a time when Israeli forces began restricting access to Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Aziz, a young man at odds with his father, witnesses, alongside his friend Mustafa, the murder of their friend Hassan at the hands of an Israeli soldier.
In Honeydew, Ben Zalkind’s new novel, tech billionaire Moses Honeydew is intent on tunnelling into the core of the earth. I suspect readers will either be automatically sold on the book after hearing this, or put off.
The focus of the book is that compassionate curiosity of the narrator Eric as he tries to puzzle out his life, his times.
Bedell explores the life of Steve, former insurance salesman, current husband and father to two children, who is just trying to make everyone happy and earn a living.
During his stay, he takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey through the eyes of a Westerner witnessing life under oppression in places like Hong Kong and mainland China, where teenagers play with drones, yet banned books are smuggled into the country.
Nolan D. Insyte conjures a milieu that feels at once raw and surreal, calling to mind the spectral streets of Dylan’s Desolation Row and, in a sly echo of the author’s own forward, Wilde’s Vera; or, The Nihilists, where misfits and nihilists collide in a kind of gauzy, narcotic ballet.
The first utterance by Larry, the raucous novel’s restless narrator, indicates just how far things did progress from the book’s early days as a sturdy pioneer saga: “I’m grateful for this cell and its vinyl padded walls and floor that they laughably justify so that I don’t harm myself.”
Young’s characters yearn for community, for untroubled friendships, for peace, love, and understanding (to quote Nick Lowe)—as though they too grew up with a notion of the Welcome Wagon and feel nostalgia for something they hold dear but cannot actually manifest in their everyday lives.
With their time together limited, teenage tragedy is inevitable – yet James becomes more himself with each passing day.
Songs for the Broken-Hearted by Ayelet Tsabari is a brilliantly complex family story, set amidst the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, and told by Yemeni Jews, a group which is both Jewish and Arabic, and suffers from a considerable amount of racism.
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a towering achievement.
We follow Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man who he never knew and a white British mother, forever an outsider in his conservative village, who receives a scholarship to a local boarding school.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
