Books
Lydia Bunt
I’m one of the women in the pages of Elinor Cleghorn’s new history of the female body, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. I’ve dealt with strange chronic pain throughout my early twenties. Still, I’ve always felt like I could articulate fairly clearly what I felt was wrong with my body, at least in my own words, if not in a medical sense, and have been lucky enough to see a series of compassionate GPs, gynaecologists and physiotherapists (all themselves women). Cleghorn’s suggestion that “the answers reside in our bodies, and in the histories our bodies Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost alone among my friends, I liked and admired Ed Miliband, renewing my on-off relationship with the Labour Party having watched his first speech to conference live on TV. I had always considered him decent, thoughtful, intelligent – and, on the couple of occasions I met him, personable and (dare I say it) attractive. But the media decided long before the bacon sandwich incident that he was a nerdy no-good and the view widely prevails that “the wrong Miliband” got the gig – that David would have been electable in 2015 and therefore saved us from even more unnecessary austerity and the Read more ...
Jon Turney
An army on the move must be as disturbing as it is, on occasion, inspiring. In E.L. Doctorow’s startlingly good civil war novel The March, General Sherman’s column proceeds inexorably through the southern United States like a giant organism. It appears as “a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of 12 or 15 miles a day, a creature of 100,000 feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels.’'The image came repeatedly to mind while reading Nichola Raihani’s exploration of how and why organisms co-operate. Some do it so Read more ...
CP Hunter
Absorbed meets Allison at the end of her relationship with Owen. They are at a New Year's Eve party when she realises that their 10-year partnership has wound down. So far, so normal. But even within this introduction, we are drawn into Allison's head, the promise clear that the anxieties she hears on a daily basis will become secondary characters to the plot itself.It is after the party, in their hotel room, that Allison's paranoia transforms into the titular experience; instead of allowing Owen to break up with her, Allison absorbs him: “I began to feel that I was sinking… we are becoming Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a flick of a switch apart, separated only by one fleeting moment of madness, or perhaps clarity.” Wilby’s book The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak takes the view that breakups make us stronger, better people, and this collection charts the end – arguably for the better – of several of her relationships and those of her social circle. As she says, “breakups have been the biggest learning experiences I have had.”Wilby is a comedian and writer based in south London. Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
School assembly: one of the many great traditions to be upended by the pandemic. According to this novel, that might not be such a bad thing. It looks like hymns and barely secular thoughts-for-the-day have been swapped out for inspirational, aspirational presentations packaged and delivered by young, gifted and disillusioned City workers, such as the narrator of Assembly, Natasha Brown’s debut. Disillusioned is perhaps the wrong word for someone who has never been, at least in one sense, under any illusions. You get the impression our narrator has always been, if not above, then over it.It’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The glamorous unreliability of Esther Freud’s father, Lucian Freud, is an inescapable force in her novels. There he is, turning up like a bad penny in Love Falls, or The Wild, or Peerless Flats, leaping from taxis into restaurants or betting shops, ordering champagne, driving too fast, shifting from foot to foot in the darkness, ambivalent, alluring.Although I Couldn’t Love You More, Freud’s ninth novel, is a re-imagining of her Irish mother’s pregnancy and its repercussions, some of its most vivid parts concern her father. Here he’s in the guise of Felix Lichtman, a sculptor who haunts the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.First up is Sam Lee’s Nightingale, a beautifully made hardback, packed with illustrations, facts, stories, lore, and more. While the focus here is avian song and the projective wonders of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to empty rooms in shabby pubs. Meanwhile, wealthy and fêted poets pen verses entitled “Composed at – Castle” or “To Sophonisba Anguiscola” and their agents immediately juggle megabuck offers from LA: “In poetry, first class was something you didn't need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory.” Dead Souls, the first (almost) conventional novel by poet Sam Riviere, shares Amis’s engagement both with male Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
In the first short story of Lucy Caldwell’s collection Intimacies, “Like This”, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a parent occurs. On the spur of a stressful moment in a café, an overloaded mother takes her screaming toddler to the toilet and leaves her baby in its pram with a woman she barely knows. When she returns, the pram is still there, but the baby is gone: “You have left the most helpless, precious thing you own with a complete and utter stranger.”“It happens like this”, we are told at the story’s beginning. Such pointers highlight the tale’s artifice, Read more ...
Charlie Stone
"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce”. In layman’s terms, it is the art of decorative painting, the technique of creating an optical illusion whereby a surface appears three-dimensional. It’s also the subject of this book. Painting Time, Maylis de Kerangal’s latest novel, translated by Jessica Moore, is an ode to that somewhat overlooked side of the artist’s craft, a determined evocation of the skill, dedication and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come. Adapted and directed by the actress Emily Mortimer, who has given herself a plum supporting role as an errant mother known as "the Bolter", the between-the-war three-parter is off to a galloping and giddy start, as if taking its cue from the breathless Linda (Lily James) at its ever-pulsating heart. The course of true love may not run smooth, to co-opt a line from a Read more ...