book reviews and features
Zalika Reid-Benta: Frying Plantain review - tales of growing up young, black and female in Toronto
Sunday, 16 August 2020
It is as unsurprising as it is vital that a spotlight has been thrown on writing by people of colour this year. It is unsurprising, too – looking at bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic... Read more... |
Nick Hayes: The Book of Trespass review – a leap over England's walls
Sunday, 16 August 2020
Since snobbery and deference have a big part to play in Nick Hayes’s exhilarating book, let’s start with the obligatory name-drop. I have lunched – twice, in different country piles, and most... Read more... |
Matt Haig: The Midnight Library review - an uplifting modern parable
Tuesday, 11 August 2020
TW: This article discusses suicide, suicidal ideation, antidepressants and self-harm We first meet Nora Seed, “nineteen years before she decides to die”, as she plays chess in the... Read more... |
Sharon Dolin: Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir review - a poet’s life filtered through Hitchcock’s lens
Sunday, 09 August 2020
Poet Sharon Dolin’s memoir Hitchcock Blonde ends (no spoilers) in the same way as... Read more... |
Alex Halberstadt: Young Heroes of the Soviet Union review - a familial history of the twentieth century
Saturday, 08 August 2020
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union... Read more... |
Hiromi Kawakami: People From My Neighbourhood review - deft and feather-light
Wednesday, 05 August 2020
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My... Read more... |
Ali Smith: Summer review - a hopeful present, beautifully described
Sunday, 02 August 2020
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and... Read more... |
Mary South: You Will Never Be Forgotten review - canny tales of uncanny tech
Sunday, 02 August 2020
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the... Read more... |
Emily St John Mandel: The Glass Hotel review - a Ponzi scheme and its ghostly repercussions
Saturday, 01 August 2020
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy review - lost friends and new hope
Sunday, 26 July 2020
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times... Read more... |
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