Tag Archives: debut fiction

Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal

Granta
2009
9781847081162
All the world’s a stage…
A novel as a performance, more – a novel as flirtation (the performance of flirting): self-conscious, inviting yet exclusive. The reader is all the roles, all the characters and all the actors – for in The Rehearsal there are layers of fictional existence – blended, glowing, beating with … not so [...]

Things We Didn’t See Coming – Steven Amsterdam

Sleepers Publishing, 9781740667012, 2009
Things We Didn’t See Coming is a series of vignettes, from different stages of the unnamed protagonist’s life in a dystopian alterno-present/future. It is a post-apocalyptic story, but told in a hard-boiled, yet highly resonant literary style. The sentences are sharp, the character is hard and the environment is one of rapid [...]