Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange’s second novel and a sequel of sorts to There There. I’ve been sitting on this book since last fall because I knew it was going to be a difficult read, and yes, it is difficult to read because it is sad and tragic, but Orange’s writing is so devastating beautiful that it helped propel me through the book.
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An Awfully Big Adventure was originally published in 1989 and is set in Liverpool in 1950. Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this novel, and was nominated four other times, but never won. I bought An Awfully Big Adventure from Daunt Books in Marylebone, London on my recent trip to the UK. I bought this novel because it is supposed to be a “darkly comic novel” about a theatre company, but I do not find anything comic about An Awfully Big Adventure because all the characters in the novel are pathetic.
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