Haunting. Devastating. Profound. Those words cannot even begin to describe this book.
Readers will meet Tom Kettle. He’s a retired detective with the Garda, the police service in Ireland. He has been sitting in his wicker chair in the small place he rents, staring at the Irish Sea, eating sausages and killing time. Or is time killing him?
“Romantic Comedy” delivers on all fronts, with energetic prose, humanity and hilarity. Although readers may hesitate to relive our recent pandemic days, in Sittenfeld’s hands, the collective nightmare is a catalyst for showing us how to live, how to love and how to be sincere even when making jokes is easier.
Johanne Lykke Holm's transfixing novel "Strega," in Saskia Vogel's virtuosic English translation, is a thought-provoking fairy tale for our flawed patriarchal world, its freighted moral the haunting observation that "a woman's life could at any point be turned into a crime scene."