Amongst Women by John McGahern

Amongst Women by John McGahern is a novel published in the year 1990, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has come to be recognised as one of the great Irish novels of our time. The novel has a simple plot encompassing a small cast of characters, of which most are women. Every character is endearing, dark and compassionate, constantly ever-changing as the sudden transformations in the physical landscape. In Amongst Women, the characters laugh, smile, revel in their naughtiness amidst the dark clouds hovering above them. This is the writing that breathes life into the dying fiction, and we need more voices like them to keep the blood flowing in the veins of prose. Amongst Women is one of the few triumphs of fiction that achieves greatness through its simplicity and original human voice. It is a book of a lifetime, go read it!
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Voss by Patrick White

Voss is difficult and formidable, yet it also proves to be one of the greatest novels of our time. I might agree that some of the colonial adventures shown in the book might seem old-fashioned to the new readers, but I would say almost every sentence of this book is calculated and purposeful. Seldom there have been writers who have such a balanced command over liminal spaces in our psychological and physical horizons of nature. The novel rides astride on two boundaries enriching the story with movement. The words move like sharp darts across the fertile landscape to the bleakest thoughts of its memorable characters until they merge to create a mind-bending portrait of new realism.
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Review of The Corrections

In my view, I never expected that a twenty-first century writer would have possessed such a great talent for characterisations and meditations on life. Writing had become more about the language, the theme and the idea of the world rather than the shameful emotional impulses of its characters. What differentiates this novel from its ancestral roots in Tolstoy, Mann and Dostoevsky, is the fact that its greatness doesn’t lie in its length, dimension or scale but the inner workings of the characters’ psychological mechanism. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen pictures a small time period in their lives with flashes of memory similar to a collage, appreciating non-linearity over linearity of time and space which the characters inhabit. Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/2HmWeNC

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a tour de force which will make you laugh, smile and feel heartbroken at the way things happen to people and often happen to good people in life. The novel is superbly humorous yet devastatingly tragic; it makes the reader feel helpless, who is a spectator unable to do anything to pull out the characters from their pit of overwhelming unhappiness. Whatever happens to Oscar Wao is incredibly sad, yet the character himself is wonderfully written. The novel beautifully addresses other aspects of the first-person narration, for instance, the unreliability of the narrator. It is very difficult to differentiate between physical reality and the subjective psychological perception of it, which the characters are experiencing. https://bit.ly/2Zk29ZZ