This book was a big hit when it came out a few years ago but I only got around to reading it this year. It’s a big, ambitious, engrossing novel set in New Zealand, about a small environmentalist group — a collective, if not actually a commune — committed to creating urban gardens, often on land they don’t own and don’t have permission to use. The group members are idealistic, but also prone to the stresses, cynicism, discouragement, and interpersonal conflicts that plague all groups of idealistic people who mean well.

When the group’s leader encounters a super-rich businessman who has his own reasons for wanting to court the group and offer them the kind of financial support they can only dream of, decisions have to be made about compromises and values. Does it end well? Well, the book’s title is a reference to one of Shakespeare’s best-known and bloodiest tragedies, and you know how Shakespearean tragedies usually end? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This novel was a very quick and enjoyable read for me, about a wealthy New York family and the “outsiders” who have married into it. It was definitely more character than plot-driven, with the main emphasis being on the family dynamics between the parents, their grown children, and the children’s partners. What I particularly liked was how explicit the novel is about wealth and social class; how much those elements put strain on the relationships between the couples in the novel. We don’t think or talk enough about social class in contemporary North American society, I think, and I really liked the way this novel explored that aspect of the family dynamic.

I picked this book up almost by accident and wasn’t really into it at first until I started appreciating it as comedy (as the author intended). The hapless titular Arthur Less is a moderately successful writer who is grieving a missed opportunity at love as his ex-boyfriend is getting married. He strings together a bunch of speaking/teaching opportunities into a round-the-world tour during which he is supposed to be writing his next novel.

The core conceit here is that the novel that Less is writing kind of is the novel Less (I presume at least some parts of the character are autobiographical for Greer, if not the specific details of Less’s life and journeys). He is trying to write a serious novel about a moderately successful white gay American writer having a bit of a midlife crisis, but when it’s pointed out to him that it may be hard for readers to care about the angst of such a relatively privileged character, he gets a bit stalled. His breakthrough comes when he decides to turn it into a comedy instead.

There were times when Less (the character) irritated me a little, but he definitely irritates himself too, and the book was overall very enjoyable to read.

After my belated discovery of Marian Keyes and really enjoying the novel Grown Ups, I started reading some of her series about the Walsh family. There are seven books in all, I think, about this wildly dysfunctional Irish family of four sisters, each of whom is trouble in her own way. I haven’t read all of them: I read Rachel’s Holiday and Again, Rachel, which are both about Rachel Walsh and are set maybe 20 years apart, the first when Rachel is a young woman struggling with addiction, and the second meeting her at midlife when she has things much more together but is still grieving some major losses that occurred in the years between the two books. Similarly, Watermelon, which I also read, is an early Walsh sisters book about Claire who is pregnant and has just left her husband. My Favourite Mistake is another set in more recent times, featuring Anna.

In general, I like the ones where the sisters are middle-aged (including this one, My Favourite Mistake, which I think is the latest Walsh sisters book) better than the books about them as younger woman: I found the characters hard to like in their 20s but enjoyed them much more in their 40s. These are books that deal with heavy subjects (addiction, mental illness, divorce, infidelity, infant death, etc) but with a light touch that uses a lot of humour. Some of the humour, I suspect, hits better if you’re actually Irish. I did like these books and while I doubt I’ll ever be a “must read every new MK book the minute it hits the shelves” kind of fan, I definitely would read more.