book reviews and features
Sarah Hall: Burntcoat review - love after the end of the world
Saturday, 09 October 2021
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or... Read more... |
First Person: Andrea Levy's husband recalls her path toward becoming a novelist
Thursday, 07 October 2021
The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song ... Read more... |
Wole Soyinka: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth review – sprawling satire of modern-day Nigeria
Thursday, 07 October 2021
Eight-years passed between the publication of Wole Soyinka’s debut novel, The Interpreters (1965), and his second, Season of Anomy (1973). A lot happened in... Read more... |
Extract: The Breaks by Julietta Singh
Wednesday, 06 October 2021
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence? Julietta Singh “admit[s]... Read more... |
Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Man from the Future review - the man, the maths, the brain
Tuesday, 05 October 2021
Suppose I’m a novelist plotting a panoramic narrative through world-shaping moments of the first half of the 20th century. I’ll need a character who can visit a bunch of key sites. Göttingen in... Read more... |
Ruby Tandoh: Cook As You Are review - truly a trailblazer
Monday, 04 October 2021
Ever since her appearance on The Great British Bake Off in 2013, Ruby Tandoh has been a breath of fresh air to the food... Read more... |
10 Questions for writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Tuesday, 28 September 2021
Anyone familiar with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s bestseller The Body Keeps the Score (2014) will recognise the ghost of his title in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s My Body Keeps... Read more... |
Barry Adamson: Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars review - the post-punk colossus spills his guts in a raw style
Friday, 24 September 2021
For those not familiar with the murkier corners of British rock music history, Barry Adamson was a significant... Read more... |
Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion and Tragedy, Sky Arts review – too much and not enough
Wednesday, 22 September 2021
Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy lived a life of in-betweens. Modern yet traditional, the son of a builder who went on to become a famous... Read more... |
Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle review - period piece speaks to the present
Tuesday, 21 September 2021
More than once, reading Colson Whitehead’s latest novel Harlem Shuffle, the brilliant Josh and Benny Safdie movie Uncut Gems from 2019 came to mind, which was... Read more... |
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Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...
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 ...
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...
DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just...
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manch...
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming...
Banging Denmark, Finborough Theatre review - lively but conf...
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of...
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, Listening
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great...
Music Reissues Weekly: Linda Smith - I So Liked Spring, Noth...
Three years ago, the release of Till Another Time 1988-1996 generated a thumbs up. A compilation of recordings by the Baltimore and/or...
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river...
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this...