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Alistair’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alistair’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Alistair Mackay’s Followers (115)
869 books
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107 friends
1,100 books
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65 friends
363 books
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18 friends
1,417 books
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88 friends
558 books
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58 friends
1,249 books
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1,395 friends
2,256 books
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77 friends
838 books
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862 friends
More friends…
Alistair Mackay
Goodreads Author
Born
in Johannesburg, South Africa
Website
Twitter
Genre
Influences
Margaret Atwood, K Sello Duiker, Clarice Lispector, Richard Powers, De
...more
Member Since
January 2018
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Alistair Mackay
questions,
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Queer Africa: Selected stories
by
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published
2013
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9 editions
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It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
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published
2022
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2 editions
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The Child
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The Lucky Ones
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Queer Africa 2
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Alistair Mackay hasn't written any blog posts yet.
Alistair’s Recent Updates
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Alistair Mackay
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2 other people
liked
Marcus’s status update
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Alistair Mackay
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1 other person
liked
Amy’s status update
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Alistair Mackay
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2 other people
liked
Tarryn's status update
Tarryn
is on page 100 of 383 of On Writing
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Alistair Mackay
rated a book really liked it
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| "No such thing as guilty pleasures; only pleasures" - This, they tell me, is what the youth have done for us, and for literary culture. Just because I love literary fiction, high art, Booker Prize shortlistees... doesn't mean I need to feel ashamed o ...more | |
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Alistair Mackay
rated a book really liked it
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| It probably says more about me than the book that I absolutely loved this until towards the end when it became very centred on God / a higher power. I know that that's a part of the AA programme, and addiction is a large part of what this book is abo ...more | |
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Alistair Mackay
is currently reading
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Alistair Mackay
is 22% done with All the Way to the River: Man, I am loving this. And relating to a lot of it, which is alarming
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Alistair Mackay
is currently reading
All the Way to the River
by Elizabeth Gilbert (Goodreads Author) Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee in Readers' Favorite Memoir |
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Alistair Mackay
rated a book really liked it
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| I loved Levy’s living autobiography series, and I struggled to get into this for the longest time, for the simple reason that this isn’t that. This feels constructed. It feels like a novel, and that got in the way of my wanting to read what Deborah h ...more | |
“It's so stupid, this idea that land can be owned. Land, which existed long before people... It doesn't belong to us. If anything, the soil owns us. It lets us move around for a bit and then it takes us back.”
― It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
― It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
“He has this blissful sense of the way patterns repeat themselves throughout the universe at different scales. A forest on every mossy tree. A supernova in the iris of an eye. To the gods, we’re tiny dust mites on a blue marble in space. To the infinitesimal ecosystems we can barely see, we’re bumbling giants. We’re the gods, and we haven’t yet learned to control our destructive powers.”
― It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
― It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― Paradise Lost
― Paradise Lost
“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― The Overstory
― The Overstory
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
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“Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.”
― The Friend
― The Friend
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
― Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 322134 members
— last activity 0 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Gays of Goodreads
— 3531 members
— last activity Apr 29, 2026 10:32PM
everyone welcome! let's all find cute, bookish (boy)friends. ...more
African Literature Book Club
— 213 members
— last activity Sep 14, 2025 07:20AM
This group is meant to promote African Literature or books based on genuine African culture and written by African authors. Every month there will be ...more
The Mookse and the Gripes
— 2166 members
— last activity 3 hours, 19 min ago
Forum for spirited and convivial discussion of fiction from around the world, with particular though not exclusive focus on 20th and 21st century fict ...more
Rainbow Writers & Readers
— 924 members
— last activity Jan 19, 2026 02:12PM
A safe place to talk about GLBTQ+ fiction, from m/m romance to trans* and queer books. Please note if you are requesting to join, either your profil ...more
