This month’s stack was as varied and unpredictable as the weather – where did the British summer go? With fewer review copies landing on the doorstep I resorted to digging deep into my must-read pile with varying degrees of success. Elena Ferrante’s My Beautiful friend was a bit of slog, Ann Cleaves’ The Long Call presented a potentially interesting new protagonist in DI Matthew Venn and then there was Kerouac’s The Big Sur which reminded why I love beat writers and what a real summer looks like, California style.
‘And we come out on the highway and go right battin up to Monterey in the Big Sur dusk where down there on the faint gloamy frothing rocks you can hear the seals cry’
So what tops the July shortlist? Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Here are some of my thoughts with no spoilers…
If you were left wanting more after What Belongs to you then this hardback release is for you. Greenwell’s new collection of short stories expands the world he created first time round with more layers of vividly poetic texture.
The stories cleverly inhabit the same world, and broadly the same characters, but the short story format allows for so much more to be packed in. In expert prose Greenwell simultaneously digs deeper and more widely to weave a richer and more complex tapestry.
Obsessive inclusion of Bulgarian phrases aside, Cleanness delivers an impressive follow up that cements Garth Greenwell’s talent as a storyteller unafraid of the truth.
‘The sound of the crowd grew louder, that inchoate sound, formless and primal, inhuman, hardly animal now but primordial, chthonic, like a sound the earth would make’
