New Beginnings with Topping & Co.
Updated: Nov 13, 2024
The Waves

Life is a succession of new beginnings, and we just so happen to get caught up in them. Or at least, that’s what the five characters prove to us in The Waves. In her classically hypnotic, stream-of-consciousness style, Virginia Woolf captures whole biographies in under 200 pages, and we witness the psychic growth of each character from the inside. How do they reckon with grief, love, and growth? The answer, according to The Waves, is to relent to the rhythm.
Unlike a traditional narrative, and rather true to life, there is not one true climax. Instead, small waves break in a beat immortal. This is not your first beginning and shan’t be your last, so take this as a companion for living, rather than a map for navigating whatever choppy waters you’re in. The Waves is a ‘read-before-you-die’ book for me, though infinitely better to have read before-you-live.
Review written by Ruby
Everything’s Fine

Egregiously mis-marketed as an enemies-to-lovers romance, Cecilia Rabess’s debut novel, Everything’s Fine is a psychological and literary masterpiece. Based on her own experiences entering the largely white ‘boys’ club’ of corporate spaces, Rabess’s protagonist, Jess, is one of the most compelling narrators to emerge this year. Her struggle to reconcile her own identity with the tempting ease of assimilation as she enters the financial world for the first time proves a gripping slow-burn descent into tragedy. This is the perfect read for all recent graduates or incoming freshers entering a new cultural environment — a haunting warning against the forces that attempt to erode you into a carbon copy of the status quo. Read it — read it to the end. It’s not the kind of book you could, or should, give up halfway. All I can hope is that this is only the beginning of Rabess’s literary career. Review written by Sofia
The Idiot

For all incoming freshers (and university students in general) in desperate need of feeling understood, Elif Batuman delivers in her 2017 debut novel The Idiot. The story follows Selin’s first year at Harvard University, where she experiences a series of young-adult ‘firsts’ in the realm of academia, friendship, and love. Batuman articulates the rite-of-passage, awkward interactions that epitomise the first-year experience. What’s more, if you finish The Idiot and find you’re not quite ready to say goodbye to Selin just yet, Batuman chronicles her second-year in Either/Or, which came out five years later. In between The Idiot’s many clever, introspective passages, you might just find that Batuman knows you — a lost twenty-something year-old uni student — even better than you know yourself. Review written by Hannah
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