CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Lightning strikes painful familial chords in Uruguay
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FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Older Brother
by Daniel Mella
(Charco Press, £12.99)
EARLY on a February morning in 2014, during a violent summer storm at a beach near Piriapolis in Uruguay, lightning strikes the lifeguard tower where Alejandro is sleeping. It kills the 31-year-old musician and surfer and injures his girlfriend Ana Laura.
What happens next is the focus of this work, part-fiction, part-autobiography, by Uruguayan novelist Daniel Mella, who is Alejandro’s older brother.
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