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Cane
Cane
Dec 15, 2025 1:21 PM

Author:Jean Toomer

Cane

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature due to its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

Reviews

She's writing about the only things that matter – love, goodness and how to be happy

—— Patrick Gale , Independent

The plot is both comical and moving, and it’s a book that everyone who’s ever been tempted to throw in the towel and become a hermit should read....despite the grand subjects at issue, the novel’s tone is not at all dry or didactic – it is, on the contrary, wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social comedy reminiscent of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym

—— Guardian

Her characters are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force

—— New York Times

How bloody good her novels are – how intelligent, how lucent, how divinely crazy. They’re fun – I’d forgotten that

—— Sarah Waters , Guardian

Above all, she was a consummate story-teller, prodigiously inventive and generous, in the realist tradition of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

—— Independent

A tragi-comic masterpiece... A magnificent novel

—— Susan Hill , The Lady

Her best book… Classic Murdoch tropes… are married to a spry and well-developed plot

—— James Marriott , The Times

The Bell is not frightening, precisely, but it offers that uneasy sensation of being suspended, somehow, between what is familiar and what is strange… a kind of hot, dreamlike muddle… The Bell has, in the 60 years since its publication, lost none of its power to disrupt

—— Sarah Perry , Daily Telegraph

Anyone who wants to learn what the revolution against the fat society is all about should read Marge Piercy's novel

—— Time

Courageous, haunting, and beautiful-with EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, Luiza Sauma takes us on a breathtaking voyage through both the farthest reaches of space and the innermost depths of the human soul

—— Peng Shepherd, author of 'The Book of M'

Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving

—— Guardian

What Sauma captures so excellently is the low level anxiety that hums through everyday life

—— Telegraph

Her writing is beautiful

—— Rachel Seiffert, author of Dark Room and A Boy in Winter

Weird, wonderful and beautifully written

—— Daily Mail

Sauma has the horrors of the workplace nailed with satirical precision

—— Sunday Times Culture

Absorbing and ambitious. Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social-media dominated times, and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond sharp prose with barely a wasted word. . . It deserves to be on every prize longlist this year

—— i

For fans of Black Mirror

—— Elle

Millennial angst meets sci-fi

—— Stylist

Sublime

—— Otegha Uwagba, author of 'The Little Black Book'

An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending.

—— Daily Telegraph on 'Flesh and Bone and Water'

Luiza Sauma's debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work.

—— Anita Shreve on 'Flesh and Bone and Water'

Her writing is beautiful. I am sure I'll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come

—— Rachel Seiffert, author of the Booker-shortlisted 'The Dark Room'

Rebellious and subversive... Williams excels at visceral descriptions of bodies and food alike

—— Mail on Sunday

A bold and fresh story about food, friendship and feminism...compelling reading.

—— i

Bold, wild and witty

—— The Sunday Express

A small utopia celebrating the intoxications of female friendship and standing as a private bulwark against patriarchy

—— TIME Magazine

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

—— Scotsman

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

—— India Knight

Nation, published in 2008 (this year's award catchment runs from August 2008-September 2009), is an extraordinarily complicated tale about God, tradition and loss. Yet it is told with beautiful simplicity and rollicking readability.

—— Andrew Johnson , The Independent

Funny and profound, Nation is much more than an adventure story, pitting reason against religion and offering an alternative perspective on world history and culture.

—— Time Out

As Pratchett says: "Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you." His wit is on every page; his world surpasses ours, his writing is weird and wonderful. No, weirdly wonderful. It is gripping but put the book down to ponder the thoughts inside to unearth a parallel universe. Terry Pratchett is worth more than his idiom; his teachings contain more philosophical thought than I would have ever thought possible.

—— Sian Reilly (aged 13) , Sunday Express

A brilliant first novel

—— Rose Tremain , Daily Mail

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

—— Irish Times

A dazzling read

—— Image magazine

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

—— Observer

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

—— Hello!

Intoxicating

—— Prima

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

—— Victoria Sadler

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.

—— History Extra
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