tue 14/10/2025

book reviews and features

Brenda Navarro: Empty Houses review - the pains and pressures of motherhood

Daniel Lewis

The horror novelist Sarah Langan recently compared motherhood to being treated like a game of Operation. “The point of the game is to correct us...

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun review - what makes us human?

India Lewis

Unsettling, unremitting and psychologically stark, Klara and the Sun has all the hallmarks of a...

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Katherine Angel: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again review – the complexities of consent

Lydia Bunt

Katherine Angel borrows the title of her latest book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, from an essay by Foucault. The phrase parodies the supposed...

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Frances Larson: Undreamed Shores review - journeys without maps

Boyd Tonkin

Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with...

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Joseph Andras: Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us review - injustice and tenderness in the Algerian War

Daniel Lewis

Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the...

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Karla Suárez: Havana Year Zero review - maths, phones and mysteries in down-at-heel Cuba

Boyd Tonkin

Havana, 1993. Far away, the fall of the Soviet empire has suddenly stripped Fidel Castro’s Cuba of subsidy and...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Amina Cain on her first novel and her eternal fascination with suggestion

Jessica Payn

Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I...

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Jackie Kay: Bessie Smith review – vivid writing about the Empress of the Blues

Sebastian Scotney

Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-...

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Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This review - first novel goes beyond the internet

Markie Robson-Scott

This is a novel, says Patricia Lockwood in her Twitter feed, about being very inside the...

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CLR James: Minty Alley review - love and betrayal in the barrack-yard

James Dowsett

CLR James came to London from Trinidad in 1932, clutching the manuscript of his first and only novel. He soon found work, writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian, as well as a...

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