A Town Called Solace: ‘Will break your heart’ Graham Norton

Product Information

Most of us had one or two favoured novels that really struck us, but we couldn’t persuade the others, or sometimes there was a novel where we thought this was a really really good, thoroughly satisfying novel, but does it quite break the new ground or change the horizon in the way we hope a Booker winner would? I have been in headlong love with Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and subversive mind since her memoir Priestdaddy, but her first novel, No One Is Talking About This(Bloomsbury) , sent me reeling. Writing is everyday alchemy and fiction writing is maybe more so (though I’m a novelist and guilty of bias). Angry, rebellious Rose had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. Clara doesn’t know this yet, but Liam remembers what it was like to be that child and he is the one adult who doesn’t lie to her.

What do we learn about attitudes to the elderly from the conversations that Elizabeth and Martha have? So Solace, while not a real town, is true to her memory and, despite the sometimes gruff or know-it-all locals, an emotional landmark for the three central characters, all of whom are processing trauma and looking for places of comfort where they can start over. Damon Galgut’s The Promise (Chatto) sustains the same moral purpose while being funny, angry and absurd all at once.BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Her characters are so clearly and beautifully written, shaped by circumstances of their family situation, ones they don’t always have control over .

Seven year old Clara is smart and wise and sad, sweet with innocence and one of the most responsible children I know in books or in real life. Clara carries the burdens of loss and grief that are difficult even for adults to handle and I dare you not to be heartbroken for her.To winning effect, Lawson’s first novel since 2013’s “Road Ends” (set in Struan, in northern Ontario, a short drive, we might guess, from Solace) relates its story with three sequential narrating points of view.