Episode 27 - Fiction Reads for Summer

Published: Feb. 24, 2020, 4:24 a.m.

Episode 27 - Fiction Reads for Summer

Join Katherine and Nisa for the second of our ‘Summer’ episodes.

It has been a great year for fiction lovers, but here are a few of the  titles that resonated with Katherine and Nisa.

'Damascus' by Christos Tsiolkas an historical novel, but with a take on St Paul of the early Christian Church like no other. Visceral, transformative, brutal & beautiful.

To change the pace totally, we review Sally Rooney’s debut novel,  'Conversations with Friends' and her second novel, and twitter sensation, 'Normal People'. She brings her signature style, spare prose and insightful psychological acuity to  the exploration of the lives and loves of that  most intriguing of generations, the millennials.

Finally Ian Mc Ewan’s 'Machines like Me'?, this is speculative fiction of the top order,  its themes range from artificial intelligence, what constitutes consciousness and the formal demands of the haiku poem. Darkly humorous, its most compelling theme is “moral choice”

Fiction titles discussed include:

Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas, Allen & Unwin 2019.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape/Vintage Publishing 2019.

Normal People by Sally Rooney, Faber and Faber 2018.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, Faber and Faber 2017.