won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”
At the Guardian Sherwood tagged ten favorite adventure stories for girls, including:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)Read about another entry on the list.
Spanning the golden era of comic books, Josef Kavalier arrives in New York a refugee and teams up with his cousin Sammy Klayman to create The Escapist, a Jewish fusion of Superman and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Travelling from Europe to Antarctica, the novel is a quest to escape from the horrors of the Holocaust: “Having lost his mother, father, brother and grandfather … his city, his history – his home – the usual charge levelled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf.”
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is among Phong Nguyen's seven books that live halfway between history and myth, Francis Spufford's ten top New York novels, Jenny Shank's top six works of literary fiction that take their mythical creatures seriously, Joel Cunningham's top twelve books with the most irresistible titles, and Sam Anderson's list of five books we'll still be talking about in 2020.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
