A Book of Blues
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Review
'A writer with a gift for expressing the ordinary in an original way. Excellent.' --Kate Saunders, The Times
Product Description
The blues speak of many things, most of all love. In these contemporary, often humorous and frequently surprising stories, Courttia Newland s collection of family, friends, lovers and strangers endeavour to navigate a world where love presents as many obstacles as opportunities. A music journalist suffers a crisis of faith in Miami. Young London goes hip-hop crazy circa 1988, turning from Farah s and Clarks to baggy jeans and fat-laced trainers. Old friends make a belated attempt to reconnect disparate lives, and a social recluse finds an unexpected companion in a Victorian cemetery. Threaded with the constant pulse of music, A Book of Blues explores both physical and internal landscapes via the never-ending diversity of human relationships. Weaving dialects and maintaining remarkable empathy, these heartfelt tales explore intimate moments of quiet drama. Illuminating and enigmatic, Newland composes vivid, inimitable songs of self-discovery, tenderness and hope.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I would highly recommend this book. It's like carrying the city in your pcoket. Newland has such a fine sense of place and character it's impossible not to get totally absorbed in his writing. I especially enjoyed that the women in this book are complex, intelligent, sexy, passionate and above all real. I raced through this book in two sittings - totally un-putdownable !
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In many ways this is a book about the ordinary, yet it is approached in such an engaging manner that what Seinfeld's observations on normal aspects of human behaviour does for comedy, Courttia's depiction on the complexity and diversity of love and relationships does for contemporary literature. Excellent.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Many vivid characters people this collection of stories written from a wide variety of perspectives. These stories travel in both space and time: they take us from Kenya to London to Miami, from Victorian London, to 1988 to the present and offer us a privileged window into contemporary culture. Newland's biggest strength is that he effortlessly gets under the skin of, to name a few, a young rapper, a young single mother, a jealous lover, a poor boy made good. My favourite story was probably All Woman, where a young mother tries to keep up with her teenage daughter on a night on the town to celebrate her daughter's eighteenth birthday. Often his stories show us people in crisis or at turning points in their lives but there are no easy resolutions in the book. In this network of stories the total truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts to give us a wider picture of the world. Relationships are built and are fractured, difficult pasts are revisited and flawed human beings keep making the same mistakes over and over again but the author manages, through his gift of empathy, to keep us engaged and caring for all of them.
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