Books
Daniel Baksi
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades since, she has established herself as a canonical figure in postcolonial and Māori literature. Grace’s second novel, Potiki (1986), winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and now re-released after thirty-four years, is an anguished account of a small family living on a remote stretch of New Zealand’s coastline. Set “at the curve that binds land and sea”, it is a searching examination of human nature, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road, with all its detours and disorientations. Captured at intervals, from her thirties to her fifties, McBride‘s protagonist picks up the tangled threads of a woman’s life. In a sense, this work follows on from the stricken childhood conjured in her remarkable debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and the youthful passion and misery evoked in its Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather, if you are new to her writing. Sometimes they are pithy, aphoristic; mostly they stretch to the extent of a vivid vignette, and the logic that links them is not necessarily linear, but spatial, as they slip from observation to joke to anecdote to rehearsals of Q&As and facts carefully collected like objet trouvés, although the gaps between them never feel abrupt. The “plot” happens in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in Yekaterinburg through the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, no doubt needed all the extra cultural support he could find, witnessing control of the city pass between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and living there when the Imperial family met its end. That tragic page of history provides a chapter for Roberts, loosely following her search for Read more ...
Florence Hallett
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists. But so much for appearances – radicalism is the bricks and mortar of Bloomsbury’s university buildings and Georgian terraces, which in the early 20th century were home to countless figures who thrived in society's margins, among them artists and writers, academics and political thinkers.Francesca Read more ...
Jessica Payn
To the Lake, Kassabova titles this book, but the journey it unfolds tells of not one ancient lake but two: “twins” Ohrid and Prespa, the Lake of Light and the Vale of Snow; these siblings feed each other’s waters through underground streams (the only "subterranean communication system" of its kind in Eurasia). Meanwhile, above, the waters sit “embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds of Western Macedonia and eastern Albania” in a region that was, once upon a time, “the nerve centre of the Balkans”. The singular of Kassabova’s title might points us towards the fact that her narrative Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Conjuring up nostalgia for a past readers never had is, perhaps, the litmus test for any good coming-of-age story. Writers have the hard task of making the general particular – because growing up, in one way or another, is universal whereas how and when and where we do is not. They also have the equally, if not harder, task of making the particular general – blurring that focus enough for the rest of us to share in their vision. A bit like using a state-of-the-art camera to take an early photograph; a twenty-first century Stieglitz.For his debut novel Swimming in the Dark, Tomasz Jedrowski Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Those of us who have to toil and sweat with other languages often feel a twinge of envy when we meet truly bilingual folk. That ability to switch codes, seemingly without any fuss, must confer so many benefits. More than ever, bilingualism blossoms across an increasingly connected world, often under the radar of social and educational policy. I know people who will claim to be no good at languages – in the formal, academic sense – and then phone their mum to chat in Urdu or in Greek.It might even be the case that Britain’s varied bilingual communities – from Polish- to Punjabi-speakers – Read more ...
James Dowsett
In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate Derbyshire), the lonely frequently enter into each other’s orbit. Their loneliness is intensified by every rotation they make of one another. These are people at the very margins of society. It is here where the author plies his trade. In this worthy follow-up to the Booker International Prize-nominated Bricks and Mortar, which was set in Leipzig’s red-light district in the days of the former GDR, Meyer returns to Germany’s fringes. His stripped-back prose is suffused with meaning.The short Read more ...
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 collection, Deaf Republic, which was nominated for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize. As an afterword, the note acts as a cautionary gloss on the silences within the preceding poems: do not take these at face-value, as absences of sound. Instead, they seem to ask us to think of silence as a shorthand for ideas of courage, fortitude – silence as "a soul’s noise".By turns joyous and calamitous, aching and prescient, the collection follows more than ten years on Read more ...
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, novelist, editor, performer and former addict spent a couple of decades rubbing shoulders with the writers, artists and eccentrics of bohemian Mumbai before putting pen to paper in the late 90s and, eventually, offering a glimpse of that underworld in his kaleidoscopic first novel, Narcopolis.After courting one literary prize (the 2012 Man Booker) and picking up another (the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature), his sophomore effort, The Read more ...
India Lewis
Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s childhood in Motherwell, on the outskirts of Glasgow, and her first steps into adulthood. However, while this book is ostensibly about Deborah Orr the child, it is as much about her parents, John and Win, and about Deborah Orr the adult. Everything seeps into everything else, just as Win seeped into Orr’s life, claiming her daughter’s whole being as her own. As Orr recognises in retrospect, “I realise now that my mother’s main trouble was her pathological inability to understand at all that Read more ...