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Two Brothers
Two Brothers
Dec 4, 2025 10:47 PM

Author:Bernardo Atxaga,Margaret Jull Costa

Two Brothers

An elegiac tale of lost innocence and the ruthlessness of the natural world, where the hunter all too soon becomes the prey. As he dies leaving his two boys orphans, Paulo's father lays on him the duty to look after his retarded but overgrown younger brother, for otherwise Daniel will be put away in an institution. But Daniel never listens to his brother, who is unable to exert any authority over him. Instead Daniel, aged twenty and still in the throes of puberty, goes off in an inept, fumbling pursuit of the village girls, as they ride past on their bicycles on the way to sewing lessons or cake-baking classes. Among these girls are pretty Teresa and her plain friend, Carmen, a girl disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek. Both of them are sweet on Paulo, the quiet, irresolute but handsome lad who works in the family sawmill, while Teresa is the reluctant, indeed disgusted, object of Daniel's dreams. Each girl schemes to cut the other out and win favour with Paulo. All ends in tears. And the narrators of this story, who take turns to continue the tale, are creatures of the wild, driven by their inner voices - a bird, squirrels, a black snake.

Reviews

The Oathbreaker’s Shadow is a very promising debut in what bodes to be an electrifying duology.

—— Robin Hobb

Absolutely gripping

—— Conn Iggulden

The Oathbreaker's Shadow is a rare, rare thing; something new in fantasy. At last we've got a story without all the tropes of elves, ogres and knights but a high adventure inspired by Mongolia.
McCulloch's story is rich with life, real, vivid and utterly compelling.

—— Sarwat Chadda

Exotic lands, cool magic and high adventure - The Oathbreaker's Shadow has it all . . . the most compelling fantasy I've read in years

—— Jonathan Stroud

Precise, compressed, intimately rhythmic, mesmerizingly smart

—— Globe and Mail

[Moore’s] pedigree is apparent on every page

—— Barry Didcock , Herald

Caught is an elaborate cat and mouse chase, written with a haughty bite. With ever growing command and intensity, Moore’s omniscient prose slowly reveals an intricate trap which surrounds her protagonist. Her investment in characters’ verisimilitude makes it hard not to root for the bad guy... Moore’s narrative landscape is rich in imagery and personality, contributing to the lasting impression of her latest novel.

—— Maria Whelan , The Skinny

Caught is a literary adventure story, which is to say it is both action-packed while being an investigation into character and motive. An outstanding novel, combining the complexity of the best literary fiction with the page-turning compulsive readability of a thriller.

—— National Post

As trippy, mellow, and revelatory as Hearn’s weed, Caught takes pleasure from rewriting crime formulas and gives pleasure in doing so.

—— The Vancouver Sun

This is an author who grips you with her impeccable use of language. The novel walks a great line between paperback levity and psychological intelligence.

—— Macleans

It is a page-turner that also displays great psychological insight

—— Good Book Guide

Caught is not just a good old-fashioned adventure story, but also has the epic, tragic weight of Homer’s Odyssey

—— Rebecca Foster , Nudge

Funny and surprisingly moving

—— Glamour

It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented

—— Sarah Jessica Parker

Enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged with the mysteries of belief and disbelief . . . dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be

—— Guardian

Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown

—— Washington Post

Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition

—— Metro

Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs

—— Independent on Sunday

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

—— FT

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

—— BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

—— Express

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

—— Independent

A virtuoso piece of entertainment which hurtles satisfyingly towards its conclusion after delivering a startling, didn’t-see-that-coming sucker-punch of a twist.

—— A Life in Books

Funny, moving and thought-provoking

—— Big Issue in the North

The key to Harkaway’s writing is the incredibly textured depth and imaginative characterisation. It is one of those books whose character are so rich that by the climax, you feel like they’ve penetrated your reality and you want to keep them close, even after the book is over.

—— Nudge

Original and exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work

—— Morning Star

Original, exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work.

—— Morning Star
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