Tag: literary fiction

Book Review – Where Are the Kings by Donal Ryan @DoubledayUK #20BOS26

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About the Book

Something terrible has happened to Jack but no one seems to want to talk about it.

His uncles can tell him about everything from quantum physics to how to hunt for deer, but they can’t seem to tell him anything about their own sister or why Jack doesn’t feel sad for her in the way he should, or why Grandad tries to shoot Jack’s dad when he gets out of the hospital.

Still, there’s work to be done in the oily wonderland of his uncles’ garage; there’s his beautiful aunt Rose to hypnotise him and his loving grandparents to console him; then there’s JJ, who wants to fight him one day and save him the next.

But with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, it is difficult for Jack to understand the person he is becoming. How can a simple boy learn to become a king?

Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: 13th August 2026 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

Twelve-year-old Jack’s life changed forever the day his mother died in tragic circumstances. With his father no longer on the scene, it’s left to his mother’s family to welcome him into their home. His Nana and Grandad, aunt Rose and three uncles – Haulie, Theo and JJ – are trying their best to support Jack in his grief, the extent and nature of which even he is struggling to understand or express.

The Connells are a wonderfully messy, idiosyncratic and at times unruly family but theirs is a home filled with love. Nana rules the roost and Grandad is the first to defend his family in any situation. Jack’s uncles Haulie and Theo run a garage, servicing and repairing cars whilst engaging in almost non-stop, often earthy but frequently hilarious, banter and entertaining Jack with tall stories. (Anyone who’s read any of Donal Ryan’s previous novels will know he has a real gift for dialogue and capturing the rhythm and lilt of an Irish accent.)

Although he is Jack’s uncle, JJ is not much older than Jack and initially their relationship is fractious, especially since they are forced to share a bedroom. Things are also complicated by Jack’s adolescent attraction to his aunt Rose which often provokes embarrassing and inconveniently timed physical reactions.

What I found particularly moving about the book is how Jack feels he must suppress any outward expression of grief, unaware that in fact it is more apparent than he realises. And he is burdened by constant feelings of guilt. Heartbreakingly, he believes it is something like a betrayal of his mother for him to feel moments of happiness. ‘He’d tell her he was sorry for being so happy all the time. No, not happy, exactly, but not sad either, not thrown down roaring crying the way he’d have thought he would be if he were to imagine being where he is now, back before it all happened, before the lake and the funeral, and the changed world.’

As we know witnessing traumatic events can have strange effects on the mind. In Jack’s case, every now and again fragments of events leading up to his mother’s death rise to the surface. He can’t make sense of them all, they don’t form a complete picture until, of course, they finally do. What he realises then is that his is a family with many secrets.

Where Are the Kings is a poignant exploration of grief through the eyes of a child, written with insight and gentle humour.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Doubleday via NetGalley. Where Are the Kings is book 11 of my 20 Books of Summer 2026.

In three words: Tender, intimate, moving

About the Author

Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice.

His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Orwell Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.


Book Review – Flashlight by Susan Choi

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About the Book

A moment is all it takes to shatter a family. The echoes last a lifetime…

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk’s disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels.

Format: Papeback (528 pages) Publisher: Vintage
Publication date: 26th February 2026 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Flashlight was my book club’s pick for April. Had it not been, I suspect I might not ever have picked it up. Its size – over 500 pages – for one thing. However, I’m glad I did because, although I had some issues with it, I enjoyed it and learned things about the history of Korea I didn’t know before.

The book’s compelling opening scene is the starting point for a story that unfolds over decades. I enjoyed reading about Serk’s childhood in Japan. An excellent student, he embraces Japanese culture and language. His sudden discovery that his name is not Hiroshi but Seok and he is of Korean heritage, his parents having fled from the small island of Jeju to the Japanese mainland, turns his life upside down. There’s a particularly poignant scene in which he approaches his teacher with a request to look at a map so he can find the location of Jeju. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, external forces come into play. Korea is now free but divided in two – North and South Korea. When war breaks out between the two, Serk’s parents are lured by the promise of a better life in North Korea, something he fears will not be the case, while he moves to America to study.

There he meets and marries Anne, and they have a daughter, Louisa. Anne and Serk’s marriage is not a harmonious one. The only thing they really have in common is Louisa but even here they differ in approach with Serk being almost obsessively protective and Anne much more laidback.

Eventually the family return to Japan. Louisa quickly assimilates into her new surroundings, mastering the Japanese language, but Anne does not leaving her increasingly isolated. She starts to experience episodes of muscle weakness and intense fatigue, initially dismissed as psychosomatic, leaving her even more isolated and often completely incapacitated. It’s for this reason that, during a holiday on the coast, Anne is left behind when Serk and Louisa embark on their customary night-time walk on the beach, armed only with a flashlight. Serk disappears, presumed drowned, whilst Louisa is left with no memory of events of that night.

Anne and Louisa return to America. Louisa eventually leaves for college, their relationship reduced to infrequent letters and phone calls. A chance discovery forms a link with a campaign which I won’t say more about for fear of spoilers. Eventually in the final, very powerful and moving section of the book, we learn what really happened that night and its aftermath.

Condensed down like this it sounds more fast-paced than it does when you’re reading it. There were long sections during which my abiding thought was why do I need to know this? For example, a lengthy description of Anne’s method of preparing spaghetti bolognese. In other places there were big time jumps leaving gaps in the character’s lives, including quite significant events such as births, marriages and deaths. The glacial pace of some parts of the book I’m afraid made it more of a slog than it should have been. However, even the sections that felt superfluous were well-written. It just seemed as if the author having written them couldn’t bear to part with them even if they didn’t advance the plot, only flesh out the characters even more.

In case you’re wondering, there was a mixed reaction from book club members. A few really loved it but most felt a little as I did that it was an engrossing, well-written story let down by its uneven pace. Pretty much everyone agreed the final sections of the book were the most compelling and very moving. Like me, most people found Anne a very sympathetic figure. As you can tell, it was a good choice for a book club, provoking a lot of discussion and different opinions.

In three words: Fascinating, emotional, sweeping
Try something similar: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee or The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

About the Author

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award.

Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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