mon 28/07/2025

book reviews and features

Fred Vargas: The Accordionist review - intriguing Gallic sleuthing yarn

Marina Vaizey

The two haunting series of crime ...

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James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasm

Marina Vaizey

James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of...

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Jason Webster: Fatal Sunset review - more flavoursome crime in Valencia

Liz Thomson

The sixth in a series of crime...

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Emma Dibdin: 'Being scared of something is a sign you should write about it'

Emma Dibdin

When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I...

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Teju Cole: Blind Spot review - haunting hybrid of words and images

Boyd Tonkin

As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding,...

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Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'

Lisa Jewell

I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a...

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h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstream

Liz Thomson

For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started...

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Peter Høeg: The Susan Effect review - Nordic noir turns surreal

Jasper Rees

Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s...

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Sarah Hall: Madame Zero review – eerie tales of calamity and change

Boyd Tonkin

Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to...

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Enter theartsdesk's Young Reviewer of the Year Award

theartsdesk

The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art...

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