An Unnecessary Woman is a 2014 novel by the Lebanese American writer Rabih Alameddine. The book was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. [1] The novel focuses on the experiences of an isolated 72-year-old woman, Aaliya Saleh, who is a shut-in in Beirut, exploring how she deals with her changing life. [1]
Saleh secretly translates Western literature, like Anna Karenina and Austerlitz into Arabic, and makes continual references to authors like Italo Calvino. [2] Within this context the novel, thematically, focuses on the role of the reader in engaging and examining literature. [2] As The Independent describes, "Aaliyah keeps company with her writers – living and dead" instead of people. [3] The Washington Post explained, "Literature is Aaliya's religion and much of the wonderful humor in 'An Unnecessary Woman' comes from her pithy contempt for those who fail to live up to its sacred precepts." [2]
The novel's reception was generally very positive. [4] However, NPR noted that the plot is relatively limited, though the reviewer praised the writing, stating that, "I can't remember the last time I was so gripped simply by a novel's voice." [1] The Guardian 's reviewer similarly highlighted how the novel has a very "elastic" voice, as the author narrates the novel with both interior dialogue and other narration strategies. [5] The Guardian concludes positively writing that, "precisely in its strangeness, a genuine literary pleasure: a complicated one." [5] Open Letters Monthly reviewer Steve Donoghue called the novel "infinitely strange" but "smarter and more assured" than Alameddine's last novel The Hakawati . [6] Similarly The Washington Post reviewer called the novel as "epic as its predecessor". [2] The Independent gave the novel a very positive review concluding, "read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper." [3]
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North–South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
Helen Oyeyemi FRSL is a British novelist and writer of short stories.
Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese-American painter and writer. His 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Koolaids: The Art of War is a novel by Rabih Alameddine, an author and painter who lives in both San Francisco and Beirut. He grew up in the Middle East, in Kuwait and Lebanon. Published in 1998, Koolaids is Alameddine's first novel. The majority of the story takes place in San Francisco and Beirut, the sites of two very different "wars". San Francisco from the mid-1980s into the 1990s is the main site of the AIDS epidemic, especially among the gay community, while Beirut is the site of a brutal civil war.
Parrot and Olivier in America is a novel by Australian writer Peter Carey. It was on the shortlist of six books for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award.
Rebecca Stead is an American writer of fiction for children and teens. She won the American Newbery Medal in 2010, the oldest award in children's literature, for her second novel When You Reach Me.
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian. He is the author of a novella Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), a novel Open City (2011), an essay collection Known and Strange Things (2016), and a photobook Punto d'Ombra. Critics have praised his work as having "opened a new path in African literature."
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride published in 2013.
Tessa Jane Hadley is a British author, who writes novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her writing is realistic and often focuses on family relationships. Her novels have twice reached the longlists of the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and in 2016, she won the Hawthornden Prize, as well as one of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for fiction. The Windham-Campbell judges describe her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" and state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." As of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
The Pure Gold Baby is British novelist Margaret Drabble's 19th novel, first published in 2013. The novel was her first novel to be published in seven years, following The Sea Lady. In 2009, Drabble had pledged not to write fiction again, for fear of "repeating herself."
Lord of Misrule is a 2010 novel by Jaimy Gordon. The book is divided into four sections, each concerned with one of four horse races at a "down on the luck" racetrack.
The Hakawati is a novel written by Rabih Alameddine and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2008. The novel explores Lebanese families and cultures, and was well received by critics.
I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters is a 2001 novel by Lebanese American novelist Rabih Alameddine.
The Sojourn is a 2011 debut novel by Andrew Krivak which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel is a Family Saga which deals with American emigrant to Austria-Hungary, Jozef Vinich who gets dragged into World War I. Multiple reviewers compared the novel favourably to A Farewell to Arms.
So Much for That is a 2010 novel by Lionel Shriver. The novel was shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction.
The Dark Flood Rises is the 20th novel of Margaret Drabble, and was first published in 2016.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 13 October 2016.
What Strange Paradise is a novel by Canadian writer Omar El Akkad, published in 2021 by Penguin Random House. The novel centres on Amir, a young boy from Syria who has survived the sinking of a ship that was carrying him and other refugees, and his developing bond with Vänna, a teenage girl who resides on the island where Amir washed up after the shipwreck.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a 2021 historical fiction novel by Dawnie Walton.
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