Book Box: Zooming in on 5 recent blockbusters
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s book box, The Straits Times starts off the year with five blockbusters published in the last few months. Buy the books at Amazon
From fangirl to author, Thea Guanzon debuts Filipino-inspired romantasy novel The Hurricane Wars
Thea Guanzon found her community in fandom culture, which led her to write The Hurricane Wars.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF THEA GUANZON, HARPER COLLINS
SINGAPORE – When Thea Guanzon, 34, began writing fan fiction in high school, she never imagined it would lead to a three-book deal for The Hurricane Wars (2023) with Harper Voyager.
“It was just a hobby for me, that’s all I thought it could ever be. Fan fiction was my creative outlet for several years. I went from fandom to fandom and it never really stopped. Even when I was working, I would write fan fiction during my lunch breaks,” she tells The Straits Times over coffee at Toastbox in News Centre.
Fan fiction is written by fans of characters and works from literature and popular culture. These amateur writings are not authorised and usually published informally on online platforms.
Guanzon wrote fan fiction and short stories inspired by everything from the Harry Potter series and Netflix hit The 100 (2014-2020), to the animation series Avatar: The Last Airbender and even Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Miserables. Her short stories posted on blogging site Tumblr earned her a dedicated following.
Book review: The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s questioning of all privilege in Victorian England
The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s first historical novel.
PHOTOS: DOMINIQUE NABOKOV, HAMISH HAMILTON
In this first historical novel by literary superstar Zadie Smith, the titular fraud is many things.
It is an insecure writer paralysed by his own capricious fame and a bumpkin claiming to be the rightful inheritor of a baronetcy. It is also a black man living in material comfort as his peers toil away in plantations far afield.
Even Elizabeth Touchet, the reader’s indignant, widowed guide to Victorian England, is not spared from the charge. Claiming to know poverty, she is brought down an alley to a “dolly shop”, and finds herself baulking at the interior piled high with parts of things rather than things themselves: chair legs, heads of hammers, shoes without soles.
This is a different kind of historical novel by Smith, one less streamlined and propulsive, but at once more diffuse and expansive in its recreation of an important English century.
Book review: Paul Auster’s mournful Baumgartner is a novel of last things
American author Paul Auster’s latest novella Baumgartner is a slim meditation on age and grief.
PHOTOS: FABER
In American author Paul Auster’s early novel In The Country Of Last Things (1987), a young woman called Anna Blume finds herself trapped in a nameless post-apocalyptic city where everything is falling apart.
She writes, in shrinking handwriting in a notebook that is running out of space, “the end is only
imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realise you will never get there…You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end”.
Her fate in In The Country Of Last Things is left open-ended, but the name Anna Blume resurfaces in Auster’s latest novella Baumgartner, a slim meditation on age and grief.
Book review: Yu Miri’s The End Of August a feat of multilingual translation set in colonial Korea
This behemoth of a book by Yu Miri is no light read and will reward only the scrupulously patient reader.
PHOTOS: RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Spanning Korea’s tumultuous 20th century and told in at least four languages through the perspectives of more than 30 characters, Yu Miri’s The End Of August is pure literary ambition.
This behemoth of a book by the Japanese-language writer of Korean descent is no light read and will reward only the scrupulously patient reader. It demands a tolerance for shifting viewpoints, unconventional punctuation and a generous appetite for acclimating – even surrendering – to the denseness of a multicultural colonial world.
Partly autobiographical, the novel sees a fictional Yu Miri revisit her grandfather Lee Woo-cheol’s life in Japanese-occupied Korea as a running prodigy hoping to compete in the 1940 Tokyo Olympics.
Book review: The Vaster Wilds is a gripping tale of survival that gets lost in the woods
Lauren Groff sets her protagonist on a gruelling journey through the forests of embryonic America in The Vaster Wilds.
PHOTOS: ELI SINKUS, PENGUIN GROUP
Across the vast and unforgiving wilderness of 1609 America, a girl flees for her life. A runaway servant from the Jamestown settlement, she is armed with nothing but a few scraps of clothing, a knife and a pewter cup. She sets a course for north, seeking “men of a similar god”.
How she will make it or what she will do once there, she does not know. For now, only one thing matters: survival.
Lauren Groff’s heart-pounding latest book, The Vaster Wilds, is a gruelling exploration of what it means to survive — both in the known world and out of it.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Jan 6
PHOTOS: MANILLA PRESS, PENGUIN LIFE, SCHOLASTIC
Cat Kid Comic Club #5: Influencers by Dav Pilkey tops the Children’s list.
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