Reckoning by Magda Szubanski

This is a deeply personal story – well it is an autobiography – from the very funny, very human comedian Magda Szubanski. It’s coloured by the tragedy of family experiences in war torn Poland and her own struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. The book focuses mainly on the impact both these major issues have on her relationships with her family and with her career. Magda is not a literary writer, so a lot of this reads pretty much like a personal journal and in fact I think may be just that. However the personality of this woman shines through and you cannot help but warm to her and feel sympathy for her as she battles to understand both her father and herself.

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

I really like the pacy writing style of JSF. A lot of his fiction reads like Woody Allen is talking, fast and furious, with a New York accent. This book is about Jewishness, as played out in a family that spans Israel to America. Against a background of debate about Jewish questions - Zionism, faith, how far you should uphold tradition, loyalty and betrayal - it charts the breakdown of a family relationship as the individuals in it try to find their inner selves. It’s a bit fraught and I found it a bit wordy, but then that’s probably just me being impatient and being on holidays so not wanting to get too bogged down in having to think too much.

The Brief Wondrous Life Oscar Wao by Juno Diaz

While the last book I read was about Jewishness, this one is about Dominican-ness. Set in America and the Dominican Republic, this complex book tells the story of a young Dominican, Oscar, and his struggles to fit in with society. But it’s really a device to focus the reader’s attention on the story of the Dominican Republic, about which I knew nothing, and the horrors of the Trujillo dictatorship, the violence, the corruption and the aftermath. It takes a while to figure out who exactly is telling the story, though that’s part of the interest actually, and it’s told in an authentic Dominican voice. The narrator adds numerous footnotes to explain who characters or or what events relate to. It’s not an uplifting story, but certainly a fascinating one. Diaz is obviously some sort of genius when it comes to structuring his novel as well; there’s the usual range of plot structures that 99 per cent of writers use and then there’s this, which doesn’t really fit any mould. I got a bit lost in some of the rantings from some of the characters, and skipped a few pages here and there, but that was as much wanting to get to the end to find out the worst because the suspense was killing me!

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

What an achingly, heartbreakingly, beautiful tragic story. It reads as the intimate exploration of Lucy Barton’s life and her journey of self realisation. She reflects on her appalling childhood, beautifully understated so that one can only imagine the true horror of it. You don’t need to know the detail but the damage it has done is evident. The glimpses - of her as a child locked in a truck while her parents work, of her brother paraded round the streets because he dressed in her clothes - suggest a brutality that has marked her for life. Her desperate longing for some sort of acknowledgment of her mother’s love, never realised, is heartbreaking. Yet Lucy Barton quietly arrives at a peace with herself, an acceptance and understanding of who she is and along with that the ability to move forward into a kind of contentment .