book reviews and features
Nathalie Léger: The White Dress review – masterfully introverted
Sunday, 22 March 2020
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator... Read more... |
Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women review – the literary titan laid bare
Sunday, 22 March 2020
That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity. Written in ... Read more... |
Brendan Cleary, Great Eastern, Brighton review – last orders
Thursday, 19 March 2020
St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But... Read more... |
Christopher Booker: Groupthink review – an uncritical history of political correctness
Sunday, 15 March 2020
“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final,... Read more... |
Emma Glass: Rest and Be Thankful review – fiction from the paediatric front-line
Sunday, 15 March 2020
How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it... Read more... |
Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs review - a book of two halves
Sunday, 15 March 2020
Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was... Read more... |
Hilary Fannin: The Weight of Love review – unravelling knotty lives
Sunday, 15 March 2020
The relationship between Joe, Robin and Ruth is far from your average love triangle. On the face of it, Robin loves Ruth, but after introducing her to his charismatic friend Joe – an artist and... Read more... |
Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Non-Existence review - feminism, hope and the great American West
Sunday, 08 March 2020
Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that... Read more... |
Joanna Trollope: Mum & Dad review - redemption in Spain
Sunday, 08 March 2020
In common with her literary forebear, Joanna Trollope’s light hand refrains from the introverted angst so common in contemporary novels. Her immensely readable, witty renderings of English... Read more... |
Christos Tsiolkas: Damascus review - the author of The Slap goes biblical
Sunday, 01 March 2020
To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're... Read more... |
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Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn...