It’s been a few months since I did a reading roundup, so here we go. Instead of trying to catch up on the months I missed, I’ll just focus on what I read in August.

After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell

Alice takes a train from London to Scotland to see her family, but something she sees at Edinburgh station is so traumatic that she takes the next train south, and later, in London, she steps into traffic. She spends the novel in a coma, and the disjointed narrative with its shifting narrative voices and timelines reflects her precarious state, while showing us how she came to this point. It’s a beautiful literary novel, and one of the strangest but most poignant love stories you’re likely to read.

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is one of the best-selling novels of all time in Japan, and I can see why. It’s a story about a young man’s complicated relationship with his older mentor, but it’s also a beautiful evocation of the end of the Meiji era, and beyond that it’s a meditation on timeless themes like guilt, honour, and atonement. Another great read!

Unbuild Walls by Silky Shah

Next, a little non-fiction. I think I ended up reading it simply because I loved the title, which refers to an excellent Ursula Le Guin quote from The Dispossessed: “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

I was expecting this book to make a strong case for the abolition of border restrictions and immigrant detention, but instead it gets quite deep into the weeds of immigrant justice campaigns in the USA over the past two decades. There’s value to that, of course, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for.

Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? by Maryse Condé

I’ve been meaning to read more novels by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé since her death last year (I know, it’s a horrible reason to get to long-delayed reading projects, but that’s the truth of it). Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? is a wonderful tale spanning settings across Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America around a century ago. The cover calls it “A Fantastical Tale”, and it delivers plenty of magical realism as well as a diverse cast of fascinating characters and the ongoing mystery of who really did slash Celanire’s throat (and how she will take her revenge!).

The Verdict

I didn’t read as many books in August as in previous months, but what I lacked in quantity I made up for in quality. The three novels were excellent, and the non-fiction book was good—it was more that I wasn’t the right audience for it.

To discover more good books, look at the list of all the books I’ve reviewed on this site since 2007. And be sure to check out other people’s roundups over at Feed Your Fiction Addiction.