thu 03/04/2025

book reviews and features

Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead review - on vengeful nature

Katherine Waters

In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible...

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Michael Hughes: Country review - epic troubles

Matthew Wright

Michael Hughes’ second novel, superimposing the post-96 Troubles on the story of The Iliad, rides a wave of Homeric re-tellings, with Pat Barker and Colm Tóibín having recently...

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Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century review - a sceptic's optimism?

Marina Vaizey

The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by...

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P.E.Caquet: The Bell of Treason review - the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia

Jasper Rees

It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time...

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h 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - other stories, other voices

Boyd Tonkin

If history repeats itself, better hope that it corrects its mistakes as well. This year’s nominations for the...

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Roger Scruton: Music as an Art review - how to listen?

Marina Vaizey

Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the...

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Annie Ernaux: The Years, review - time’s flow

Katherine Waters

“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The...

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Rachel Heng: Suicide Club review - skin-deep dystopia

Katherine Waters

When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and...

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Stella Tillyard: The Great Level review – reason and passion in the Fens and Virginia

Boyd Tonkin

The Fens of East Anglia, and the lonely coasts that skirt them, usually sit well below the horizon of mainstream culture. Yet when England’s flatlands and their maritime margins do find a literary...

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Guy Stagg, The Crossway review – a gripping pilgrimage through faith and doubt

Boyd Tonkin

On new year’s day in 2013, Guy Stagg set out to walk alone from Canterbury to Jerusalem. He planned this journey, which would take ten months, cross 11 countries and cover 5500km, in the wake of...

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That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of...

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“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's...

Owen Wingrave, RNCM, Manchester review - battle of a pacifis...

It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this,...

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Spring may have sprung, but there’s little in life to truly raise the sprits, so this week’s release of Who Believes in Angels? ...

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