SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at books that use horror to tackle the atrocities of history. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands Of Ghosts seeks redemption in storytelling
Fans of Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy (2017 to 2019) can be forgiven for being puzzled on their first encounter with her latest book.
Unlike the dreamy fairy-tale world immediately conjured in her previous books, The Warm Hands Of Ghosts opens in startlingly realist mode.
There is an author’s note about the battle of Passchendaele in Belgium during World War I in 1917, a detailed map of the cities of Poperinghe and Ypres vis-a-vis the Western front, and a box arrives in the town of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada.
It contains a uniform and dog tags belonging to Freddie, Laura Iven’s younger brother, a soldier fighting on the aforementioned Western front. It is a bleak opening, made even bleaker by the circumstances Arden puts her heroine in.
Book review: In The Invisible Hotel, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave
Yewon’s family has bones in the bathtub. Phalanxes, scapulas, collarbones. As long as Yewon can remember, she has had to help her mother wash these anonymous, blackened bones, which belonged to their ancestors.
This is not unique to her family. In the South Korean village of Dalbit, every family has a bathtub of bones.
In some households, the bones are just ash and have to be handled carefully so they do not wash away down the drain.
Women traditionally give birth in the bathtub, bearing a new generation directly onto the bones.
Book review: Fervour is a slow-burn Jewish family drama
This atmospheric debut novel, a slow-burn family saga that deals with weighty issues such as religion and teenage rebellion, is not the breeziest of reads.
The dysfunctional family in question are the Rosenthals who, the book jacket screams, are “not like other families”.
The parents are religious Jewish zealots – Eric, an unerringly devout barrister, and Hannah, an exploitative journalist – whose traditions, mythicism and beliefs shape the formative years of their three children Gideon, Elsie and Tovyah, whom readers meet in their adolescent years.
Hard By A Great Forest author Leo Vardiashvili does not want to just write about Georgia
It is difficult to read Georgian author Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard By A Great Forest without being sucked into a game of trying to separate truth from fiction.
Drawing from the author’s own move from Georgia to London when he was 12, his debut follows protagonist Saba as he makes a belated return to his home town of Tbilisi, after the mysterious disappearance of his father and brother.
The tenor of this unplanned homecoming is one that hovers between the barely believable and the fantastical, involving cryptic Hansel and Gretel references, ghostly voices and vengeful officials.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestseller March 16
Three Taylor Swift-related books have made it on the bestsellers list.
