Author: Miranda July
Publisher: Canongate
Hardback
One of our books of the year 2024!
Oliver says: There’s no writer like Miranda July. Quirky in the most sincere way, strange beyond comprehension, and wholesome in the most messed up way, her stories always seem to take detours you never expect, no matter how hard you might try to anticipate them. All Fours follows a perimenopausal queer artist who, instead of driving to New York for a work engagement, decides to begin a new art project in her first pit stop: she’ll renovate the cheap hotel room she’s staying in. She also becomes infatuated with a hot young dancer, a relationship doomed not just because of their age difference, but because they are both married. Day after day, they meet and chat and do. not. kiss. in spite of the mounting sexual tension between them. This thwarted affair does not occupy even half the book, however, and it’s only the beginning of a much larger journey for our strange but strangely compelling and endearing protagonist. Unapologetically sexual (sometimes, though not too often, even sexy), hilarious, and really off-beat, July’s latest is an exploration of artmaking and middle age like no other (and one of those rare but necessary novels that is not about queerness but it’s effortlessly queer from start to finish). Give it a go!