Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Carole Burns

Carole was Head of Creative Writing on the MA I did, way back in 2011. She was only there a year before she left, but I remember being inspired and in awe – here was a real-life published author, telling me how it was done. Since then we’ve stayed in touch, she’s even come to my writing group on a couple of occasions and it’s always wonderful to get a sneak preview of what she’s writing. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Carole Burns is an award-winning American writer and journalist living in the U.K.  The Same Country, her debut novel, named by Wales Arts Review as one of the Best Welsh Fiction Books of 2023, was described by the writer Gish Jen as “unearthing long-buried truths that remain the truths of America.” A freelancer for the Washington Post and LitHub, Burns was the winner of Ploughshares’ Zacharis Award for The Missing Woman and Other Stories. Her book, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, features interviews with forty-three writers including Jhumpa Lahiri and Colm Tóibín. She is Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and lives in Cardiff.

Find her at:
http://www.caroleburns.com
Instagram @writercaroleburns
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/carole.burns.73

Read on to find out which three books Carole recommends.

After This by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s After This contains everything I love in a novel. The language is exquisite, the tracing of a character’s thoughts subtle and precise. The novel plays with form while remaining entirely readable as it tells the story of an Irish American family (like most of her work) from the end of World War II to post-Vietnam. After This explores ideas of grief and loss and love, a family across generations, and time itself. For its boldness, it reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. McDermott has been well known in the U.S. since winning the National Book Award for her 1997 novel Charming Billy (another Irish American immigrant story, one that circles around the reverberations of a well-meant lie). She is not as widely read in the U.K., another reason to include her here. Her most recent novel, Absolution, set among American ex-pats in Vietnam during the war, is my favorite of her more recent books, though less perfectly constructed than After This. The first time I re-read the earlier novel, I’d discovered she’d set up one theme of the book so powerfully at the end of the first chapter that I gasped. 

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead earned much-deserved acclaim for Underground Railroad, but I want to draw attention to his equally daring 2001 novel, John Henry Days. According to folklore, John Henry was a Black railroad worker who raced a steam drill to prove he could hammer away more rock than a machine. He won, but it killed him. Spinning a pinwheel of stories around a fictional festival in West Virginia to mark a new American postage stamp commemorating John Henry, Whitehead enters the points of view of the songwriter who wrote the ballad, the folk legend himself, and a varied cast of contemporary characters attending the festival. We follow a freelance journalist beholden to p.r. flaks; a woman burdened with her father’s collection of John Henry memorabilia; and an intern reporter – the only actual journalist on the scene, we learn as the novel jumps ahead in time, when a worker “goes postal” at the festival, undermining the happy marketing of John Henry as native son. Then we’re back at the opening reception. Now, we watch events unfold through the hyper-realistic lens of that future shooting, as Whitehead examines, among many other ideas, the false stories we tell about our countries, ourselves. I may be tired of pointing out that books from twenty and thirty and forty and fifty years ago remain relevant to the racial and social injustice still prevalent today, but it’s true.

The Visitor by Katherine Stansfield

The Visitor is the first book by the poet and mystery writer Katherine Stansfield, and in this gorgeous novel that interweaves the past and the present of an old woman, Pearl, you can see the beginnings of her later books. It is, like her mystery series, set in Stansfield’s native Cornwall, and as an American still new to this country when I read it, I loved being immersed in the history of that seaside landscape: the wind-swept cliffs; the tuck nets catching the “glimmering quiver that is the pilchards”; the now-depleted fishing industry; the invading tourists. Stansfield, also the author of two books of poetry with Seren, brings a poet’s attention to language to this story, too, with sentences like these: “She had lived by the sea her whole life. The salt was wearing her away. The bones of her hand were raised. Like shells.” The language, the setting, together evoke the interior life of Pearl, haunted by an old love, whose consciousness swims in and out of the past and the present like seaweed in a tide. The novel is and isn’t a romance, but it is entirely a romance for me – I fell in love with The Visitor.

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I read Charming Billy by Alice McDermott a long time ago, and have no idea why I haven’t ever picked up another of her novels. Katherine Stansfield I have to admit I haven’t ever heard of, but isn’t that the joy of Read This? I had the pleasure of doing an event with Colson Whitehead last year, and he was a very generous and funny man. I’ve read a few of his books, but not this. I must! Any of these three catch your eye? And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change
Susmita Bhattacharya author of Table Manners
Vanessa Harbour author of Safe
Freya North author of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne
Judith Heneghan author of Birdeye
Clare Mackintosh author of I Promise it won’t always Hurt like This
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You
Alice Winn author of In Memmoriam
Anna Mazzola author of The House of Secrets
Alice Peterson author of The Saturday Place
Jenna Smith bookblogger
Lucy Atkins author of Windmill Hill
LV Matthews author of To Love a Liar
Jo Furniss author of Dead Mile
Ruth Thomas author of The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line
Clare Pollard author of The Modern Fairies
Nina Stibbe author of Went to London, Took the Dog
Nassaibah Younis author of Fundamentally
Cara Hunter author of Making a Killing
Leena Norms author of Half-Arse Human
Cate Baum author of Land of Hope