book reviews and features
Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto
Tuesday, 22 September 2020
On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the... Read more... |
James Rebanks: English Pastoral, An Inheritance review - a manifesto for a radical agricultural rethink
Monday, 21 September 2020
Coming from a family of farmers, with periods of time spent working on a farm in the past ten years, I found James Rebanks’ English Pastoral: An Inheritance to be a highly... Read more... |
William Feaver: The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailed
Sunday, 13 September 2020
This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by... Read more... |
Nick Hornby: Just Like You review - funny but inauthentic Brexit novel
Sunday, 13 September 2020
Nick Hornby’s protagonists are worlds apart. Joseph is a Black 22-year-old with a “portfolio career", which includes shift work at a butcher’s and a leisure centre and the distant dream of... Read more... |
Susanna Clarke: Piranesi review - the mysteries of the House
Sunday, 13 September 2020
The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted... Read more... |
Matthew Sperling: Viral review - whip-smart satire about the void at the heart of tech
Sunday, 13 September 2020
Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already... Read more... |
Naomi Booth: Exit Management review - unwrapping life's unpleasantness
Sunday, 13 September 2020
When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of... Read more... |
Gabriel Pogrund & Patrick Maguire: Left Out review - story of Corbynism from 'Glastonbury to catastrophe'
Sunday, 06 September 2020
Readers of Left Out may be surprised to find out how much of party politics is conducted over WhatsApp. The Labour Party under Jeremy... Read more... |
Wayne Holloway-Smith: Love Minus Love review – powerfully excavating the tormented poet's psyche
Sunday, 06 September 2020
Roughly two years since “... Read more... |
Selva Almada: Dead Girls review – the stark proximity of women to violence
Sunday, 06 September 2020
Selva Almada’s newly translated work has a stark title in both English and the original Spanish: Dead Girls, or Chicas Muertas. That apparent bluntness belies the hybrid... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine as Light
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I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’...
Simon Boccanegra, Opera North review - ‘dramatic staging’ pr...
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Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...
Album: Car Seat Headrest - The Scholars
Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock...