Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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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.
His narrative, dwelling on the sudden loss of a sibling, ponders the latter's transient relationships with girls, his love of music, surfing and travelling, along with the abrupt changes his early death brings to their supposedly close-knit family.
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