It’s genuinely hard to know what to say about this book. It’s vast, sprawling, and ambitious. Does it achieve its ambition? I’m not sure. This novel was recommended to me by someone who loved it and whose taste I trust, but I found the first half, maybe first two-thirds, a real slog. And yet, I’m not sorry I read it, once I got there.

The premise is simple: Sonia and Sunny are two Indian young people living in New York in the 1990s. They don’t know each other and each is in a relationship with someone else. Back home in India, their families know each other, and Sonia’s family suggests to Sunny’s family a possible match between the two. Sunny’s family is not impressed and they don’t pursue the suggestion with any enthusiasm. A long time passes before Sunny and Sonia even meet; neither family is excited about a match by this time, but attraction slowly grows between them, with many obstacles along the way.

This isn’t really Sonia and Sunny’s love story, though. It’s the story of two families; it’s a story about India and about America; it’s an exploration of loneliness and belonging, of being an immigrant and an outsider — all told in such poetic language that it’s sometimes lyrical and other times just obscure. This book is striving to be an epic and while it doesn’t always succeed you do have to admire its reach. I really had to motivate myself to keep going (mostly by the fact that my library hold was running out) but I am glad I read it and I did care, by the end, what happened to both Sonia and Sunny. I am not sure every diversion was worth taking, though.

Another reliably fun read from Rainbow Rowell. Cherry’s husband, Tom, has left her — or rather, he went away for work and didn’t come back, and Cherry is coming to terms with that. Trying to get back out into the world, she goes to a concert one night and meets an old college friend, Russ. Cherry had a crush on Russ in college, but he dated her best friend instead.

Now both Russ and Cherry are divorced and ready to explore that missed opportunity from their college days. But Cherry also doesn’t feel quite disconnected from Tom, who shows up back in town to pack up his stuff from their shared home.

This summary makes the plot sound very formulaic, but the book doesn’t feel that way — it’s light, but it’s also fresh and fun and is wrestling with real conflicts that don’t feel paper-thin. There are at least three plausible outcomes here: Cherry and Russ could end up together, Cherry and Tom could get back together, or Cherry could end the novel alone but with a stronger sense of who she is apart from her marriage. The strength here, I think, is that I had no idea till the very end which ending Cherry was going to get, which made the book feel a lot more like real life than many novels do.

There’s a lot more going on here – Cherry’s well-developed relationship with her large group of sisters, the fact that both Cherry and Tom are children of alcoholic parents which has shaped how they see the world, the issues with body image that Cherry faces as a fat woman, Tom’s career as the artist of a successful webcomic that’s based at least partly on his real-life marriage — meaning that there’s a cartoon version of Cherry out in the world that people confuse with the real woman. There’s also lots of steamy sex scenes, if you like those (or if you’re like me you can just kinda skim through them till we get to some more juicy dialogue; something for everyone). For a popular, romance-adjacent novel, this is a rich text as well as a very enjoyable read.

This is such an interesting, brilliant, at times frustrating book. It left me wanting something more, but at the same time I’m very glad I read it.

Seamas O’Reilly is the author of one of the funniest Twitter threads of all time (that link goes to him re-posting it on Bluesky years later; I assume that Seamas, like all sane people, is no longer on Twitter, but I wouldn’t know as I am a sane person), as well as the author of one of the best and funniest memoirs I’ve ever read. This is his first foray into fiction: a novel about a film crew coming to Derry, Northern Ireland to make a TV series about The Troubles and the violence in that city decades earlier.

The structure of the book took me awhile to grasp, because it doesn’t necessarily read like a novel. Each chapter is from a different first person point of view; what I realized a few chapters in is that every second chapter is from the point of view of the screenwriter who’s written the series, and the alternating chapters are all from the perspectives of different people in the town who are, one way or another, involved with or aware of the planned TV show.

The actual plot of the novel, insofar as there is one, is that just before filming is about to start, the American actress who’s been hired to play the lead in this Northern Irish drama, goes missing. Everyone speculates about where she might be and what might have happened to her, but her disappearance doesn’t really become central to the story till the very last couple of chapters. What’s central, instead, is how the various characters feel about their history, their tragedies, being fodder for commercial television — ranging from those who are horrified at the thought of reliving it all and think the past shouldn’t be dragged up again, to those who can’t wait to get a background role and make a few bucks off it.

It takes a long time to see the threads come together, to see how what happened in the past is still impacting what’s happening in the story’s today, and when it was finished I wanted to go back and read it again (haven’t yet, but may) just to see those connections more clearly. If there’s a flaw here, I think that it’s that the book is quite short and that none of the characters’ perspectives, except for that of the screenwriter, is used more than once. So we dip in and out of characters’ viewpoints very quickly, don’t return to them, and in the end the reader has to do quite a bit of the work in seeing how they all connect both thematically and plotwise.

However, I am not opposed to a novel that asks me to do a bit of the work, and the thing that makes Prestige Drama such a joy is not the plot anyway — it’s the voice, the energy, the humour and the tragedy, the brilliant figures of speech and turns of phrase, that run through these character monologues. O’Reilly captures not just the accent of Derry but the specific voices of each of these people, and the way he plays with language is such a tour de force that I could hardly look away. I can’t wait to see what he does next.