1 minute read
LILY KING
Book: Five Tuesdays in Winter
Lily King’s collection of short stories gives a voice to a wide range of characters experiencing love, loss, pride, and oppression. Five Tuesdays in Winter is emotive and moving, entrenched in character and enriching connections; it’s inevitable that you’ll find a character who will pull at your heartstrings as you embrace the ten tales that King has conjured.
Advertisement
Five Tuesdays in Winter holds love on a pedestal as the tales explore a variety of loves and relationships as you tread through the pages. Whether it be the proud grandfather’s devotion to his granddaughter, sitting by her hospital bedside in ‘Waiting for Charlie’; the writer’s relationship with her alcoholic father in ‘The Man at the Door’; or even the teenage boy, contending with loss, who finds more than he expected from a couple of college kids in ‘When in the Dordogne’, there is a great deal explored across these ten stories.
Five Tuesdays is the first book of King’s I’ve read, and I suspect it won’t be my last, as I came away from it draped in emotion and heavy with heartache. However, I was not engrossed in every tale, as some just don’t have the same pull as others. It’s the story that shares the same name as the collection, following a reclusive bookseller and his employee, that seeps into thoughts after the book has been read from cover to cover. Even with all the cliches of a Notting Hill Hugh Grant sop fest, the collection is replete with a series of vivid, enlightening, and vastly immersive anecdotes.
Five Tuesdays in Winter is out now, published by Picador
Keira Brown
Carsick Charlie
Single: Finn
Having just toured Europe with Florist, the writing of Emily Sprague would be an obvious touchpoint for Carsick Charlie, but to labour the comparison too much would be unfair. ‘Finn’ very much holds its own as a hushed yet directly resonant cycle of forlorn folk, free from obvious influences. We still know very little about the folk project of Joseph Innes, but the warming arpeggios of guitar and bowed strings that hang over this track like branches laden with winter snow are more than enough to suggest special things to come.
‘Finn’ is out now
Craig Howieson
