Latest news with #ClaireAdam
Irish Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The best books for summer 2025: our critics' top picks
Claire Adam A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay. Fast approaching her 100th birthday, the indomitable Miss Pauline is anxious to unburden herself of certain secrets before she dies. If the Jamaican dialect is difficult, as it was for me, try reading parts out loud until you get the hang of it. The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston. I read this as a judge for the Sunday Times Young Writer Award. (It was shortlisted.) It's a sort of cowboy western in Cumbria, set during the foot-and-mouth crisis. Gritty and bloody, but also beautiful and moving, and an absolute page-turner. I loved it. Claire Adam's latest novel is Love Forms (Faber) Oliver Farry Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the standout book on the war in Gaza. Part-memoir, part-despairing jeremiad, it will likely be read and studied long after the present conflict and has an inspired title that has already entered the vernacular. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is an often harrowing but stylish account of the author's addiction and recovery that is brilliantly atmospheric, imbued with the heat and dust of Mexico, where much of it takes place. Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story continues her intertextual excavation of Central European history with this acerbic feminist riposte to The Magic Mountain. Oliver Farry is a foreign correspondent and book reviewer READ MORE Ferdia Lennon The announcement of a new Andrew Miller novel is always a cause for celebration, and The Land in Winter really is a wonder. Strikingly well observed, Miller's evocation of the coldest British winter on record is the perfect summer read by way of contrast. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown is a blistering coming-of-age tale about three best friends, Shaz, Rach and Kel, growing up in Doncaster in the noughties. Utterly immersive, hilarious, and very moving. Read it. Closer to home, Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh is a brilliant and bittersweet ode to young love, friendship and GAA set over a single summer. Ferdia Lennon's debut novel is Glorious Exploits (Penguin) Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Andrew Meehan's Best Friends, a lively love story about two septuagenarians, is 'perfect summer reading' according to its Irish Times reviewer (me). It's just right for the plane or train – especially if you've got the travel pass. Patrick Holloway's debut, The Language of Remembering, is a refreshing take on the trope of the single mother in the dark 1970s, which ultimately celebrates love. One of the most entertaining novels as Gaeilge I've reviewed in ages, Darach Ó Scolaí's Bódlaer, is a sparkling, lighthearted satire on the poetry scene in Gaelic Ireland. Brilliant. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest book is Selected Stories (Blackstaff) John Boyne Róisín Lanigan's I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There has stayed with me since I read it in January. An unsettling debut about a couple renting a London flat, the novel develops a Rosemary's Baby vibe when central character Áine finds her sense of reality being undermined. A chapter featuring a foster dog is extraordinary. Sameer Pandya's Our Beautiful Boys delves into the aftermath of a school bully being viciously assaulted and the lengths the parents of his assaulters will go to in order to keep them out of jail. A literary page-turner with a nice twist at the end. John Boyne's latest novel is Air (Doubleday) [ 'I don't write a lot of personal stuff': author Róisín Lanigan on being married, divorced and surviving cancer before her 30s Opens in new window ] Sarah Moss Assuming that by 'summer reading' we mean 'life changing reading' as well as 'amusing reading', I suggest Adrienne Maree Brown's Pleasure Activism, which will invite you to think differently, more permissively, about the practice and meaning of enjoyment. It's an anthology, so between dips into it you could read Samantha Ellis's Chopping Onions on my Heart, which is also about how to be intelligently happy when there are reasons for sorrow. For absorbing fiction, Sarah Hall's new book Helm is predictably superb. Sarah Moss's latest novel is Ripeness (Picador) Claire Hennessy Campus shenanigans of decades past are skilfully evoked in two very different but equally compulsive titles: Anna Carey's Our Song , a swoony but grounded second-chance romance, and Lisa Harding's deliciously dark psychological mystery The Wildelings. Two impressive debuts: Claire Gleeson's Show Me Where It Hurts and Roisin O'Donnell's Nesting tackle impossibly painful family situations with care and nuance. Poetry lovers might want to dip into the thought-provoking new collections from Alice Kinsella (The Ethics of Cats) and Kimberly Campanello (An Interesting Detail). YA-wise , Caroline O'Donoghue's addictive romantasy Skipshock and Grainne O'Brien's delicate verse novel Solo are this summer's must-reads. Claire Hennessy's latest book is In the Movie of Her Life (Doire Press) [ Good books: The 20 best holiday reads this summer Opens in new window ] Joseph O'Connor I'd recommend The Kings Head, an excellent debut novel from Kelly Frost set in the Teddy Girl subculture of postwar England, a fascinating movement documented by the photography of Ken Russell. Frost's vivid, supple, filmic prose is a pleasure; she's a writer to watch. Sharon Guard's Assembling Ailish, June O'Sullivan's The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife and Grainne O'Brien's Young Adult novel in verse Solo, are fine achievements, as is Noelle Lynskey's debut collection of poems, Featherweight. Martin Dyar's The Meek is an exceptional second collection from a poet who is also a gifted storyteller. Full of precision, acute observation and reverent encounters with the natural world, it's a book I'll come back to many times. Joseph O'Connor's latest novel is The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker) Kevin Power The best Irish book I've read so far this year is Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuin , published by Stinging Fly Press. It's a collection of long stories, mostly set in contemporary Derry, mostly about young people, partly about the legacies of the Troubles and wholly about trauma. But the seriousness of Ni Chuinn's stories is inseparable from their superlatively rich, readable, perceptive, highly original prose. I also wholeheartedly recommend Lamorna Ash's Don't Forget, We're Here Forever (Bloomsbury), a brilliant and deeply personal book about the various meanings of Christianity in the contemporary UK. Kevin Power's latest novel is White City (Scribner UK) Rónán Hession Top of my summer reading list is The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by my favourite contemporary Irish writer, Adrian Duncan. I'm looking forward to Saltburn by Drew Gummerson and Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, the funniest writers around. My favourite books this year were On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I and II, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland – she also translated the sublime Encircling trilogy by Karl Frode Tiller, which has obsessed me. I heartily recommend The Book of All Loves by Augustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead, and What a Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard. Rónán Hession's latest novel is Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose) John Self I loved Michael Amherst's novel The Boyhood of Cain , a debut with its voice fully formed, about a boy growing up in a school where his father is the headmaster. It's sad, funny, rigorous, elegant and very Coetzeean. Irish-Trinidadian writer Amanda Smyth has written a glorious autobiographical novel, Look at You, which is a string of intensely vivid scenes from adolescence and young adulthood: love, sex, family drama, the lot. And Hassan Blasim's Sololand is three novellas around and about postwar Iraq, which are far more blackly funny than they have any right to be. He's a star. John Self is a critic Ruby Eastwood The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant are sharp and deadpan, marked by moments of striking insight. This newly gathered volume spans five decades of her work: tales of spiritually exiled characters drifting through shabby boarding houses and inhospitable cities, struggling with fraught, often impossible relationships. Her prose is composed yet surges in unexpected places. The strongest pieces feel loosely assembled: landscape and mannerisms rendered with precise clarity but never quite falling into the recognisable shape of a story. This is how Gallant operates, making her imagined world familiar, then leading you towards an unexpected or elusive truth. Ruby Eastwood is a book reviewer John Banville Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee is the biography of the American scientist Luis Alvarez (1911-1988). He was closely involved in some of the most significant, innovative – and deadly – scientific advances of the 20th century. He worked on the development of radar during the second World War, was part of the team at Los Alamos that built the first atomic bombs, put forward a controversial theory on the assassination of JFK, did important work on particle accelerators, and, late in life, discovered, along with his geologist son, that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a gigantic meteorite hitting the coast of Yucatan. Oh, and he also taught himself glass-blowing and metallurgy. John Banville's latest novel is The Drowned (Faber) Jessica Traynor I've reviewed some great books this year, including Artists, Visionaries, Siblings by Judith Mackrell , an absorbing account of the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, and the poignant This Interim Time by Oona Frawley . I've loved Elaine Feeney's ambitious and multilayered Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way and Sean Hewitt's Open, Heaven had me entranced. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is a wild and blackly funny ride through addiction and recovery. In poetry, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Keith Payne's Savage Acres, Charles Lang's The Oasis, and Dane Holt's Father's Father's Father. Jessica Traynor's latest collection is Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe) Martina Evans Tommy Orange's multigenerational Native American novel Wandering Stars spans two centuries yet reads with all the fizz, poetry and pain of something deeply remembered. Terrific characters drive a vital, unputdownable story. Disturbing, wry, riveting, Joe Dunthorne's memoir Children of Radium tells European history like never before. Dunthorne's research into his German great grandfather – scientist, inventor of radioactive toothpaste, Jewish refugee – reveals a literally poisonous family secret. The poems in Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage are easy to read, impossible to forget. Exact and complicated on the joys and pitfalls of memory. A keeper. Martina Evans's latest book is The Coming Thing (Carcanet) Henrietta McKervey Beginning with a trim, hand-luggage-only sized novel, Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection elegantly skewers the perfectly curated lives of a Berlin-based hipster couple. Set six months into the Nazi occupation of Rome, the intertwined fates of three strangers are the propulsive force driving Joseph O'Connor's excellent The Ghosts of Rome , the second in his Escape Line trilogy. A novel about a UN deradicalisation programme doesn't sound like it would be a bundle of laughs, yet Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, the story of an academic who goes to Iraq to run a UN programme to deradicalise Islamic State brides, is witty, smart and entertaining. Henrietta McKervey's latest novel is A Talented Man (Hachette Books Ireland) Neil Hegarty In Seán Farrell's first novel, Frogs for Watchdogs , we meet a little boy living in the midst of change, and we are introduced to a world crowded with danger and with fear. The novel's power lies in its intensity of feeling: a child's experience is elemental and stark and filled with powerful emotions, and love and hatred in this universe are clean-cut presences, sharply lit, vivid, unmistakable. Farrell sustains this remarkably full-tilt atmosphere throughout: and in my reading life, I have seldom felt so wholly slotted in behind a child's eyes, seeing the world as something new and – always – incalculable. Neil Hegarty's latest novel is The Jewel (Head of Zeus) Edel Coffey Abigail Dean's The Death Of Us really stood out for me this year. It's a hybrid crime novel/love story that examines the disintegration of a marriage following a violent home invasion. Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is a high-concept dystopian novel about a not-too-distant future where everyone has a 'risk rating' compiled via their metadata. This offers much food for thought on the topics of personal data, freedom and authoritarianism. I also loved Elaine Feeney's new novel Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, which is the story of a woman's relationship, but also the story of how our personal and shared cultural histories impact our lives. Edel Coffey's latest novel is In Her Place (Sphere) Michael Cronin Summer is typically when the kids are not in school, so what better time to reflect on schools and our expectations of them? Joseph Dunne, Ireland's leading educational philosopher, has written What's the Good of Education?, a challenging and compelling exploration of how education can contribute to a flourishing democracy provided that our classrooms are not hijacked by tech oligarchs and bean counters. Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is another urgently persuasive work from the author of Landmarks and Underworld. A master storyteller, Macfarlane uses richly poetic and precise prose to make a timely plea for the rescue of our rivers from callous neglect and wanton destruction. Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin Sarah Gilmartin In Greece earlier this month, I disturbed the peace of other sunbathers with intermittent shrieking laughter. The culprits? Miranda July's All Fours and Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident . Both are brilliantly observed, funny, provocative, and my favourite kind of beach read: deceptively easy. For crime fans, Andrea Carter's first stand-alone novel There-Came-A-Tapping is an involving, intelligent story, full of intrigue (and ravens). Of this year's debuts, Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors and Garrett Carr's The Boy from the Sea are two standouts, such brightly inventive storytelling from born writers. Sarah Gilmartin's latest novel is Service (One) Wendy Erskine I found Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare , a story about three young women in a Belfast shared house, so funny, taut and complex. David Collard's A Crumpled Swan, which offers 50 brief essays on an Abigail Parry poem, is an ingenious and companiable book, which considers aspects of poetics – and so much more. Marcia Hutchinson's The Mercy Step, told from the perspective of a child, is vibrant and striking, its voice distinctive. And Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, conveys the personal and political so precisely and compellingly. Wendy Erskine's latest book is The Benefactors (Sceptre) Naoise Dolan I'm currently reading Deepa Bhasthi's English translation of Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq, the first story collection to win the Booker International. There's a translator's note where Bhasthi explains the cultural context of the original Kannada language and defends her choice not to italicise foreign words or use footnotes. Good woman for treating anglophone readers like adults. Up next is Labharfad le Cách (I Will Speak to You All) by Peig Sayers . I invariably love the writers people hated in school when I read them of my own volition, so let's see if the pattern holds. Naoise Dolan's latest novel is The Happy Couple (W&N) Diarmaid Ferriter I came late to Richard Flanagan's Question 7 , published in paperback last month, but it was worth the wait. It is an extraordinary mediation on his family story, blending memoir, history and fiction, covering his native Tasmania, nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, writers behaving badly, the natural environment, and his father's prisoner of war experience in Japan. Big questions are thread through the book, such as 'why do we do what we do to each other?', how we go on, and the meaning of love and forgiveness. Each time he seems headed in the direction of answers, he underlines the emptiness of meaning. This is a melancholic, direct, lyrical and beautiful book. Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD
Irish Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Love Forms by Claire Adam: A novel of cumulative force
Love Forms Author : Claire Adam ISBN-13 : 978-0571339549 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £16.99 Love Forms is a novel about what we bury and the surprising ways it resurfaces. The first scene takes place in 1980. Sixteen-year-old Dawn Bishop, heavily pregnant, boards a boat from her home in Trinidad to a convent in Venezuela. There, she will give birth and give up the child for adoption. Her white, upper-class family has handled the logistics and made a pact: when she comes back, all of this will be forgotten. But the body remembers. So does the mind, even when it tries not to. The novel, narrated by an older Dawn (divorced, living in England, mother to two grown sons), doesn't follow a straight line. It moves by echo and examination, circling back through memories that are sometimes pivotal, sometimes seemingly incidental. Yet it never drifts. Each new memory has a weight; it shifts the balance of the narrative, reconfiguring the relationship between the events that precede it. This isn't a confession but a reassembly, a story that evolves as the narrator tries to sort through it in her mind. [ Claire Adam on St Patrick's Day in Trinidad: 'We'd come back from school to find all the Irish ladies boozed up and laughing their heads off' ] The catalyst arrives in the form of a message from a stranger claiming to be Dawn's lost daughter. After years of searching through online forums and being met with false leads, this may finally be the connection she has been seeking. But this is not a novel about reunion. It's about what happens when realisation comes too late. Dawn's voice is the novel's anchor: wise, perceptive, and eminently likable. She is a well-drawn portrait of the average middle-aged mother, who has seen far more than she lets on, and carries her experience lightly. ''Girl,' I said. 'It's not easy!' I meant it in the way only Trinidadians would understand, the marvelling at how strange the world was, how incomprehensible.' Her sturdiness, laced with exasperated humour, prevents the subject from becoming unbearably leaden. READ MORE Love Forms is a novel of cumulative force. There's no catharsis or revelation, just the quiet pressure of the past pushing against the present. As the title suggests, it's an examination of two intertwined meanings: the varied forms love takes, and the complex, often strange process by which love itself forms within us. Claire Adam brings a refreshing seriousness and sincerity to these mysteries.
Irish Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Two Irish writers up for Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
In The Irish Times on Saturday, Yael van der Wouden talks to Jessica Doyle about being intersex, her childhood in Israel and winning the Women's Prize for Fiction; Timothy O'Grady tells John Self about his new novel, Monaghan; and there is a Q&A with Claire Adam about her career and new novel, Love Forms. Reviews are Conor O'Clery on Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future by Thane Gustafson; Kevin Power on The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine; Declan Ryan on Gerard Fanning's Selected Poems; Catherine Taylor on the best new translations; John Quin on Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth; Kristen Malone Poli on Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert; Jessica Traynor on Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell; Charles Lysaght on Military Maverick: Selected Letters and War Diary of 'Chink' Dorman-Smith edited by Lavinia Greacen; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on A Family Matter by Claire Lynch; Paul Gillespie on Europe without Borders by Isaac Stanley-Becker; Mei Chin on Isabel Allende's My Name is Emilia Del Valle; John Boyne on Albion by Anna Hope; NJ McGarrigle on No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit; and Brian Hanley on Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left by Eric Heinze. Tomorrow's Irish Times Eason offer is Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin's Ordinary Saints and Catherine Airey's Confessions have made the six-strong shortlist for the £5,000 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2025, won last year by Ferdia Lennon for Glorious Exploits. READ MORE Ní Mhaoileoin said: 'I'm so honoured to be on the shortlist, and particularly to have been nominated by Waterstones booksellers from across the country. Publishing Ordinary Saints has given me a new insight into the critical role booksellers play in connecting readers with the stories we love. I'm incredibly grateful for their support.' Ní Mhaoileoin is from Dublin and now lives in Edinburgh. In 2022, she won the PFD Queer Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize Discoveries award. Ordinary Saints was inspired by the story of 'the first millennial saint' Carlo Acutis. After moving to London from Ireland, Jay is navigating normal young adulthood, when she faces a less common identity crisis: her deceased elder brother is up for canonisation. Airey said: 'I'm absolutely delighted to be on the shortlist. Confessions is a novel about not quite knowing how to be a person in the world, which I think is true for a lot of us. While I was writing, I was struck by the relative freedom I had to define my own life, compared to the generations of women who had come before me. Still, it seemed my choices were not really my own, but informed by so many sociological factors beyond my control. The book is an exploration of where we come from and where we end up going, through our choices and the choices that are made for us.' Airey grew up in England in a family of mixed English-Irish descent and she wrote Confessions whilst living in Co Cork. Skipping across generations and decades from rural 1970s Ireland and New York in the shadow of 9/11, to both places in the politically volatile present: Confessions creates a 3D view of one family and the histories its members inhabit across three generations. Also shortlisted are Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal; Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter; When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén, translated by Alice Menzies; and The Artist by Lucy Steeds. The winner will be announced on July 24th. * Andrew Miller has won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his novel The Land In Winter, which is set in a remote English community during the long, hard winter of 1962/63. The prize's definition of 'historical' is a book set at least 60 years ago, meaning Miller's novel fell just within the criterion. The panel of judges, chaired by writer Katie Grant, said: 'A true master craftsman, Andrew Miller has painted big themes on a subtle canvas of tiny detail. With rare and delicate skill, The Land in Winter opens up the lives of Bill and Rita, Eric and Irene in ways that will sing differently to each reader, and sing differently again on each re-reading. With prose as softly dazzling as the snow of the 1962/63 winter in which the novel is set, Andrew Miller takes his richly deserved place amongst the Walter Scott Prize pantheon of great contemporary writers.' Miller said of his inspiration: '[The people in my novel] … came walking slowly out of a blizzard. I leaned quite heavily into the early married lives of my parents, and some of the people they knew, all of whom are long dead now. One of the few advantages of getting older is that your own past becomes material for an historical novel." Ferdia Lennon and Kevin Barry were both shortlisted for the prize. * Ashani Lewis has won both the Betty Trask Prize and Somerset Maugham award for her novel Winter Animals. Described as 'a rare achievement' by judge Ellen Wiles, and 'told with verve, intelligence, and confidence', Winter Animals is the story of 38-year-old Elen, recently estranged from her husband, who falls in with a group of wealthy squatters and is forced to discover the dark secret that fuels their desire to escape. Lewis recieved £14,000 for her double win at the 2025 Society of Authors' (SoA) awards ceremony on Wednesday evening in London. * Clair Wills has been shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025 for memoir and autobiography for Missing Persons, along with Catherine Coldstream for Cloistered and Jeff Young for Wild Twin. The winner of the £4,000 prize will be announced at a special event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the chair of the judges, Peter Parker, at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Rd, London on July 23rd at 7pm. * The Irish Writers Centre has launched Dublin, One City, Many Stories – a six-part video series celebrating 15 years of Dublin's Unesco City of Literature designation and honouring the centre's role as an all-island resource for writers. The series captures a city teeming with stories – past, present and still to come. Mags O'Loughlin, CEO of the centre, said: 'This series is a love letter to Dublin, yes – but it's also a rousing call to every writer, reader, dreamer and scribbler who's ever felt the pull of the pen. We've created something beautiful and brave here, a true chorus of voices – some long established, some just finding their rhythm – all united by this city that seems to demand to be written about. To be involved in an initiative like this, which celebrates the full spectrum of Irish and international writing talent, is an absolute joy.' The first episode launches in July, featuring Joseph O'Connor revisiting Dún Laoghaire's Lexicon and the James Joyce Tower in Sandymount – places that first stirred his passion for storytelling. O'Connor said: 'The hometown of a writer becomes part of the DNA, and I'm blessed that Dún Laoghaire is the place where I grew up. A coastal town has stories and glories, tides and ghosts, comings and goings, a bit of grit beneath the fingernails. From the pier and the Martello tower, if the walls could talk they'd tell secrets. I'm honoured to be interviewed for this series.' Over the coming months, audiences will meet a stellar lineup of 20 writers including Marian Keyes, John Banville, Neil Jordan, Emmet Kirwan as they share their reflections on writing, place and identity – with each writer offering a unique take on the literary lifeblood of Dublin. * A new literature strand created in partnership with UCC, Western Frequencies, will be part of this year's Cork Midsummer Festival. This literary strand, on June 21st and 22nd, will explore, through collaboration, performance and conversation, the artistic frequencies and echoes and fever dreams over which we broadcast self and other cultures and communities. The programme includes a special event with New York Times bestselling poet Claudia Rankine, the work of Ivorian artist GauZ' performed as it has never been before with translations from Frank Wynne, acclaimed Irish visual artist Aideen Barry in conversation with writer Sinéad Gleeson, and a new collaboration by writer Patrick McCabe with musicians David Murphy and Michael Lightborne. Tickets are on sale now * Richard Shore, a Co Waterford children's author, has launched bedtime adventures for children with imaginative tales, and a story of helping ocean pollution. Hurrahtum Adventures! Four Magical Tales, features Poppy who lives by the sea, and has amazing adventures with a cove and boat. One story in the collection, The Tangled Tuna, highlights ocean plastic pollution and ghost fishing gear - a major ocean polluter. For every book sold, the author will donate five per cent of profits to Ocean Generation - a charity empowering an inclusive global movement to tackle ocean threats through science and storytelling. His other book - Will's Wild Adventures: Four Exciting Tales, is about Will, who lives in an amazing wilderness. The books, priced €9.99 each, are illustrated by Iqbal Sandy.
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother's loss
Claire Adam's 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for. Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it's also set partly in south London – the writer's own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart. Dawn, our 'white, young, rich' narrator, is the youngest child of a well-known Trinidadian fruit juice dynasty. At 16, after a brief encounter with a tourist at carnival in Trinidad, she finds herself pregnant. Petrified of the stigma, her otherwise caring parents make a 'pact' never to speak of it again, dispatching her, under cover of darkness, on a terrifying and chillingly evoked boat trip to Venezuela. Here she spends four months with nuns who deliver her baby – a girl she never sees again – then is returned to Trinidad to resume her schooling as if nothing has happened. But something has happened. And 40 years later, now an ex-GP living in London, divorced with two grown-up sons, Dawn is still bereft, still searching. Not just for her daughter but, because her memories of her time in Venezuela are so cloaked in shame and secrecy, for what feels like a missing part of herself. Her family kept to their pact and the episode has never again been mentioned, but for Dawn the questions have only grown more pressing with time. What part of Venezuela was she sent to? Who exactly were the nuns? Most of all, who was that traumatised teenage girl who gave up her baby so easily? After years of emotionally exhausting research – letter writing, internet forums, DNA tests – she's still no closer to the truth. And then one night a young woman in Italy gets in touch. So many of her details seem to fit. Could this be Dawn's long-lost baby? It's a situation rich with logistical and emotional possibilities, all of which Adam mines with subtlety and finesse. What could all too easily have been a straightforward case of will-she-won't-she find her long-lost child is somehow both more mundane and more unsettling. Would Dawn have had a better life if she'd kept her baby? In many ways, probably not: she was able to go to medical school and make a career for herself. Yet still the terrible, unspoken loss has left its mark on every member of the family: not just her parents, but her older brothers, her somewhat disengaged ex-husband and her sons, whose understandable priority is to protect her from further hurt. It's her parents who, believing they were acting in her best interests, are most infuriated by Dawn's apparent inability to hold on to the good life she's made for herself. 'The man had enough!' her mother explodes in frustration when, after years of putting the search before everything else, her daughter's marriage breaks down. All they ever wanted was for her to have done well despite her 'trouble' – her mother's elation at noting, on a visit to the marital home in leafy Wandsworth, that she has a cooker with eight rings, is a lovely touch. Still, Dawn's abiding sense of loss, the instinctive feeling of her daughter's absence, which 'always arrived somewhere in my abdomen, the sudden shock, like remembering laundry left out in the rain or children not picked up from school', is something whose power cannot be overestimated. Adam is great on the unsaid, the half-said, and the way feelings will unravel and morph over the years. 'Mothers will fight off lions,' Dawn tells her father in a rare, late moment of reckoning. 'Actually it was you I should have been fighting … you were the lion. I didn't realise it back then.' It's credit to this novel's ability to wrongfoot you that at this moment you find yourself feeling a flicker of sympathy for her father. And this sense of uncertainty and unease continues to the end. The final pages, which unfold at the family's beach house on Tobago, are as gripping as any thriller, and the ending, when it comes, feels as right as it is devastating. Love Forms by Claire Adam is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Daily Mail
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Crushingly tender: The best Literary Fiction out now - Fulfillment by Lee Cole, Love Forms by Claire Adam, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar
FULFILLMENT by Lee Cole (Faber £18.99, 336 pp) US author Cole didn't get the fanfare he deserved for his 2022 debut, Groundskeeping, so fingers crossed for this compulsively readable follow-up, a tragicomic tale of sibling rivalry between half-brothers, each nursing unsated ambition in early midlife. Joel is a married essayist in New York, while Emmett still lives in their Kentucky hometown, scraping a paycheck in an Amazon-style warehouse, his own dreams of authorship firmly on ice. Long-simmering grudges come to the boil after Joel's wife Alice, nudged into alcoholism by the pandemic, steals a tipsy kiss with Emmett behind closed doors at a family reunion. As well as illicit sex, the plot involves a drugs heist, crank calls and a loaded gun, adding a crackle of jeopardy to Cole's gift for fizzy dialogue and killer comic timing as he gently takes the temperature of modern America. Strongly recommended. LOVE FORMS by Claire Adam (Faber £16.99, 304 pp) Adam made a splash with her prize-winning first novel Golden Child, about the unearthing of family strife when a teenager disappears. Similar themes underpin this more ambitiously layered second novel, set in London and narrated by Dawn, a divorced mother who finds herself reflecting on the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption as a pregnant teenager in Trinidad. Now 58, Dawn feels drawn to the online profile of an Italian biochemist who could plausibly be the grown-up child. Adam pulls us into the murky tale with a deceptively unshowy style. She blindsides us with drip-fed revelations about Dawn's youth while laying out her daily grind in the narrative present as an empty-nester forced out of her job as a GP due to the hard yards of childcare. Crushingly tender, the novel explores heavy subjects without fuss. THE GOWKARAN TREE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR KITCHEN by Shokoofeh Azar (Europa £14.99, 528 pp) Previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Azar is an Iranian writer who lives in Australia as a political refugee, having been arrested several times on account of her work as a journalist. Her sprawling new novel, set in Iran in the wake of 1979's Islamic Revolution, is a decades-spanning magic realist saga anonymously translated from Farsi for fears of safety. We first see the narrator as the teenage daughter of a university teacher in Tehran. The multi-threaded plotline is lit up by a search for her brother, lost during the Iran-Iraq war, to say nothing of a love plot involving two cousins with violently opposed politics. Lent urgency by the context, this is a busy, noisy, crowded book that compels you to take the rough with the smooth.
