tue 08/07/2025

book reviews and features

Nathalie Léger: The White Dress review – masterfully introverted

Charlie Stone

Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator...

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Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women review – the literary titan laid bare

Daniel Baksi

That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity. Written in ...

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Brendan Cleary, Great Eastern, Brighton review – last orders

Nick Hasted

St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But...

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Christopher Booker: Groupthink review – an uncritical history of political correctness

Daniel Baksi

“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final,...

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Emma Glass: Rest and Be Thankful review – fiction from the paediatric front-line

Boyd Tonkin

How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it...

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Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs review - a book of two halves

India Lewis

Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was...

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Hilary Fannin: The Weight of Love review – unravelling knotty lives

Lauren Brown

The relationship between Joe, Robin and Ruth is far from your average love triangle. On the face of it, Robin loves Ruth, but after introducing her to his charismatic friend Joe – an artist and...

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Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Non-Existence review - feminism, hope and the great American West

India Lewis

Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that...

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Joanna Trollope: Mum & Dad review - redemption in Spain

Marina Vaizey

In common with her literary forebear, Joanna Trollope’s light hand refrains from the introverted angst so common in contemporary novels. Her immensely readable, witty renderings of English...

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Christos Tsiolkas: Damascus review - the author of The Slap goes biblical

Markie Robson-Scott

To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're...

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