Connecticut

Connecticut connections: A Little Hope, by Ethan Joella, reviewed

A Little Hope, Ethan Joella’s debut novel, is about the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people who live in smalltown East Coast America. By helicopter over Connecticut ‘you wouldn’t notice Wharton right away’. Yet the problems its inhabitants face are universal. There is the seemingly American Dream family – Greg, Freddie, Addie the daughter and Wizard the dog. In line with the novel’s themes of ‘hurt’ and ‘hope’, Greg develops an aggressive blood cancer and is fighting for his life. Chemo and radiotherapy weaken him; ginger ale tastes like metallic fizz and the side-effects diminish his resolve. Freddie helps out as a seamstress at Crowley Cleaners, which Darcy

America sees red: how fury prompted the slide into Trumpism

After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two daily papers published for the 16,400 citizens living in the West Virginia town of Clarksburg. Like many local reporters in those far-off days before the internet, he covered pretty much everything in his community, from boxing bouts and house fires to local politics and miners’ strikes. Later, working abroad in China and the Middle East, he would often check the paper’s website to keep up with events, observing from afar the drastic decline of both his own industry and the Appalachian state. West Virginia was a Democratic stronghold when Osnos