Our Fathers
10 best books like Our Fathers (Andrew O'Hagan): Bitter Fruit, Docherty (Coronet Books), The Bird of Night, Pascali's Island, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Shadows on our Skin, Swing Hammer Swing!, The Keepers of Truth, An Awfully Big Adventure, A Disaffection
| Author | Achmat Dangor |
| ISBN | 0802170064 |
With the publication of Kafka's Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa's political history...
| Author | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140040722 |
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
| Author | Barry Unsworth |
| ISBN | 0393317218 |
The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople. Although his reports are never acknowledged,...
| Author | Brian O'Doherty |
| ISBN | 1885983395 |
In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...
Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to...
| Author | Jeff Torrington |
| ISBN | 0156001977 |
Oh the brogue! Now lads and lassies, I don’a mind a bit a brogue, but wha’s a bloke from the States supos’ ta mak’a dis?
“Maggie, god rest’re, never had tae hinge her back tae mend oor fire – bunker aye full tae the gunnels, so it was.” Or this: “Cauld enough tae make a polar bear...
| Author | Michael Collins |
| ISBN | 0743218035 |
The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the "Truth," the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the...
| Author | Beryl Bainbridge |
| ISBN | 0349116156 |
Another little gem from the 1990 Booker shortlist. Beryl Bainbridge was a perennial Booker bridesmaid - she never won the prize, but was shortlisted five times and also longlisted once. This is my first experience of her writing, and it left me wanting to read more.
This is a black comedy set...
| Author | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 0330307363 |
Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward...
| Author | William Trevor |
| ISBN | 0670845434 |
«È così che inizia l’amore, appartenersi senza saperlo? A guardare indietro sembra così.»
Solitudine.
Ricerca di amore.
Follia.
Quanti romanzi giocano con queste tematiche?
Quanti romanzi lo riescono a fare in maniera inconsueta, con delicatezza...
| Author | George Mackay Brown |
| ISBN | 0862418143 |
Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney”, those remote islands north of Scotland where he was born and spent his life. This observation is certainly true of Magnus. The novel treats of aristocratic ambition, rousing...
| Author | James Robertson |
| ISBN | 0007150253 |
Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of...
| Author | Andrew Crumey |
| ISBN | 1909232807 |
"Pfitz manifests the same healthy disdain for realism that made his first novel, Music in a Foreign Language, such a pleasant surprise. His borrowings from Borges, Calvino and Pavic are here just as shameless. But at this rate Crumey may yet become a hero to fans of the postmodern Euro-novel who wonder...
| Author | Bernard MacLaverty |
| ISBN | 0393318419 |
The award-winning Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna — estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and...
| Author | Michèle Roberts |
| ISBN | 1853816000 |
Man Booker Prize Nominee (1992)
Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts' acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parents'...
At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus from Milan to Strasbourg, taking stock of the wreckage strewn behind him -- a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even his teaching job...
| Author | Shena Mackay |
| ISBN | 0749394064 |
When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub, for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasise her love of fire, and by the immaculately dressed...
| Author | Martin Booth |
| ISBN | 0312267533 |
The remarkably powerful and critically acclaimed novel that was chosen as A New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and shortlisted for The Booker Prize
The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually...
| Author | Caryl Phillips |
| ISBN | 0679757945 |
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant...
Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, someone is out to silence Cardinal Bern. Is it the Secret Police, or is it - more shockingly - fanatical Catholic activists who believe that Bern, by keeping the peace between Church and State, has finally compromised himself too far?
Narrowly...
| Author | Penelope Lively |
| ISBN | 0060971991 |
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
This link contains a plot description – as well as one of the three central characters (who all appear as point of view characters, in some cases all three observing the same scene)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accordi...
I...
| Author | Madeleine St. John |
| ISBN | 0786706791 |
Nicola only went to buy cigarettes and upon returning finds a stranger in her apartment. He looks like her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, but he can't actually be the dependable known quantity whom Nicola loves that goes by the name of Jonathan. Can he? Before Nicola stands a man who is strong and adorable...
| Author | Andrew Miller |
| ISBN | 0340728264 |
Oxygen
Andrew Miller
Having enjoyed Andrew Miller’s beautifully crafted prose in ‘Pure’ it wasn’t surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in “Oxygen” except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing...
