Family relationships

Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland to study drama in London and has met Stephen, an established actor 20 years her senior. In the interim period, the pair have moved from Kentish Town to Camden. Eily has taken time out of drama school, and Grace, Stephen’s daughter from a previous relationship, has made an appearance. The novel consists largely of a

Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her. Instead, her boss suggests she finds another job, citing – to Gail’s surprise – her lack of people skills. It is the day before Gail’s daughter’s wedding and, shortly after she returns home early, her ex-husband Max turns up unexpectedly, hoping

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the observations it contains were written as material for David Sedaris’s shows. The entries, which begin in 2003 and continue to Christmas 2020, are therefore, as Sedaris admits, over-polished, and what we hear on the page is a spoken rather than a written voice. There are many other voices besides, because the book is a record

Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the Times crossword almost completed at the Formica table; knitting on the go; and novels — she always read the last page first. She was one of that generation of women who didn’t go to university but were incredibly well-read and knew poems by heart. This was Kathleen, the mother of Nicholas Royle, novelist and professor of English at Sussex University. In a remarkable and moving memoir he has captured and preserved a loving, kind, impatient woman — and perhaps, with her, all of our mothers in the sweet predictability of