
We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka
The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton
Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies
We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more accurately, her third published novel, since she famously made her way through several other works and a rain-forest’s worth of rejection-slips before finding success with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) at the age of 59. It is a multi-stranded book narrated by Georgie Sinclair, a Yorkshire-born woman in her forties who now lives in London. Georgie’s husband recently walked out, leaving her alone with, among other things, a mounting level of sexual frustration and a tragic job writing for a trade magazine, Adhesives in the Modern World (this is one of many self-mocking references: Lewycka was also once a non-fiction hack).
Shortly after throwing her husband’s possessions into a skip, she meets Mrs Shapiro, an elderly Jewish émigrée.
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