thu 16/10/2025

book reviews and features

Ilya Kaminsky: Deaf Republic - silence as 'a soul's noise'

Jessica Payn

"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...

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Jeet Thayil: Low – grief’s seedy distractions

Daniel Lewis

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,...

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Deborah Orr: Motherwell review - memoir, but so much more

India Lewis

Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s ...

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Francine Toon: Pine review – trauma and terror in the Highlands

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts

Charlie Stone

Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of ...

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Rosamund Lupton: Three Hours review - gripping thriller with a Macbeth twist

Markie Robson-Scott

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...

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Best of 2019: Books

theartsdesk

In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (...

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Michael Hunter: The Decline of Magic review - when mockery killed witches

Boyd Tonkin

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,...

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Nalini Singh: A Madness of Sunshine review – a lacklustre thriller

Lauren Brown

Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the...

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Eva Meijer: Animal Languages review - do you talk crow?

Marina Vaizey

Animal intelligence has come to the fore as an essential and fashionable subject for study. Dolphins, elephants, bees, prairie dogs, gannets, whales, baboons, wolves, parrots, bats – not mention...

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