book reviews and features
Albert Costa: The Bilingual Brain review – double-talking heads and what they tell us
Sunday, 26 January 2020
Those of us who have to toil and sweat with other languages often feel a twinge of envy when we meet truly bilingual folk. That ability to switch codes, seemingly without any fuss, must confer so... Read more... |
Clemens Meyer: Dark Satellites review - eccentric orbits
Sunday, 26 January 2020
In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate... Read more... |
Ilya Kaminsky: Deaf Republic - silence as 'a soul's noise'
Sunday, 19 January 2020
"The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing." This is one of two author’s "Notes" to Ilya Kaminsky’s latest... Read more... |
Jeet Thayil: Low – grief’s seedy distractions
Sunday, 19 January 2020
Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way. The poet,... Read more... |
Deborah Orr: Motherwell review - memoir, but so much more
Saturday, 18 January 2020
Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s ... Read more... |
Francine Toon: Pine review – trauma and terror in the Highlands
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of ... Read more... |
Rosamund Lupton: Three Hours review - gripping thriller with a Macbeth twist
Saturday, 04 January 2020
This is not a drill. Lock down, evacuation. An active school shooter is on the loose, actually more than one: two or three men in balaclavas with automatic shotguns. But this isn’t a high school... Read more... |
Best of 2019: Books
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (... Read more... |
Michael Hunter: The Decline of Magic review - when mockery killed witches
Sunday, 29 December 2019
During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas,... Read more... |
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latest in today
Album: St Vincent - All Born Screaming
The thing with Annie Clark, better known as the triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St Vincent, is that much like an actual saint the...
Album: St Vincent - All Born Screaming
The thing with Annie Clark, better known as the triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St Vincent, is that much like an actual saint the...
Eye to Eye: Homage to Ernst Scheidegger, MASI Lugano review...
With a troubled gaze and a lived-in face, the portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti on a withdrawn...
Christian Pierre La Marca, Yaman Okur, St Martin-in-The-Fiel...
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians...
That They May Face The Rising Sun review - lyrical adaptatio...
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the...
Album: Pet Shop Boys - Nonetheless
This album came with an absolutely enormous promo campaign. As well as actual advertising there were “Audience With…” events, and specials on BBC...
Ridout, Włoszczowska, Crawford, Lai, Posner, Wigmore Hall re...
Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/...
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...