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Homegoing is an excellent and sometimes frustrating novel partly because of what it doesn't do. A story of two branches of the same family that are split apart in the early 1700s when one half-sister becomes a white man's filly and the other gets shipped off as a slave, it's not generally interested in cheap payoffs. Characters get to occupy centre stage for a few pages, then disappear into the fog of history - often violently, and often with little other trace than the blood and the stories they pass on to their children. Instead of telling one person's story, Gyasi uses all those people to tell a larger story of oppression that seems less systematic than cancerous, feeding on itself without even thinking about it, whereas its victims can't not have to constantly try to live with it.

When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest back in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.

Yeah, there are things about this that feel a little too much like the product of creative writing courses. But there's enough ice-cold anger and compassion with those who were silenced, and a very keen sense of how to recreate history with a few sharp details, to make it work.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.

Basically, more of the same. Gloriously bad. The entire Amsterdam excursion alone - not to mention the flights there and back - deserve some sort of medal, possibly in the shape of good old-fashioned stocks, though the podcast and Rocky's gleeful embrace of it serve just as well.

Perec's unpublished debut novel isn't great in any way, but what's interesting is that it seems to be about exactly that. Gaspard Winckler (he'd reuse the name in his last masterpiece 20 years later) is a forger who, after years of creating copies of great artworks, gets it into his head to create a copy which is also a great masterpiece on its own terms - his masterpiece as an artist and a forger. This is, in a pre-post-modernist view, impossible. So he kills his boss and tunnels out of the basement he's been working in.

Perec worked on this for years, eventually finishing the last rewrite by writing ENDENDENDEND and telling his publisher he wouldn't change another word if he didn't get a LOT more money. When he didn't, he declared that it wouldn't be published until it was found years after his death. It wasn't published until it was found years after his death.

Portrait of a Man seems to be a novel with heavy existentialist and Borgesian influences that has its own failure as its central metaphor. There are hints of the author Perec would become - the occasional wordplay, the conflict between the real and the artificial (which he'd do a lot better in a lot fewer words in A Gallery Portrait and The Winter Journey)... but for all that it gets right, it's messy and badly paced; the POV changes constantly for no particular reason, and once the central point of the novel becomes clear (especially if you read the foreword first), there's still about half the novel to go with no particular development.

Of course the 21st century version of a superhero is a muslim-American teenager who writes fanfic about superheroes. I like that. And I like how easily that fits into the standard Marvel setup of outsiders getting superpowers, and does it with a fair amount of comedy too. I just think I'd have liked it more if it didn't go out of its way to tie into the X-Men franchise - it goes a little too big too quick. But I may well keep reading this.

Furious, but clever takedown of both colonialism and slave trade (and the way it's followed on through tourism, offshore banking...) and the corruption that inevitably followed in its footsteps after that was the only law anyone knew. Once you stop being a master, once you throw off the yoke of lordship, you're no longer trash, you're just a human with all it entails. That applies to slaves, too. Once they're free, they're no longer noble and elevated; they're just people.

You know things are getting ridiculous when priests become satirical cartoonists.


- How did you decide to migrate to Sweden, of all places?
- It said "Sweden" on the grenade that blew up our house.

The others are not like us. They see themselves as good and us as evil. It's a very black-and-white way to think. Whereas we are open to new ways of thinking and don't generalise by reducing reality like others do.

Saying rape has anything to do with sex is like hitting someone over the head with a shovel and calling it gardening.

The alt-right are now looking for support for their opinions in clinical psychology.
- Just look at Rorschach; he made thousands of ink paintings of bloodthirsty muslims with huge scimitars.

It's weird. The poor need lower wages to work more, but the rich need lower taxes to work more.

Three rapes were reported at the vintage car show Power Meet in Västerås.
- I hate North African rednecks.

What I don't get about racists is that they can never decide whether the muslims are taking over or the racists are taking over.

Feels like a bit of a wasted idea. Moore supposedly wrote this to pay the bills, which is hard to not think you notice at times, but even if it's hard to find a new twist on the Cthulhu mythos he does manage to insert a few Moore-ish details, and leads up to an apocalyptic ending that feels like a decent (or indecent) conclusion. He also inserts a very drawn-out rape scene at the heart of everything that makes the story as a whole feel less dark and shocking than it feels nasty and tired.

One of those adaptations that requires familiarity with the original to make complete sense, partly because it feels very truncated, and I'm not a huge fan of the artwork either. Still, there are moments where it really works.

Not the gutpunch that Doomsday Book was, but that's probably for the best. Willis has entirely too much fun mashing up Victorian morals with Agatha Christie novels, and tying it all together with gloriously complex time-travelling logic.

Time travelling solves everything. Awwww. If only.