mon 23/12/2024

book reviews and features

Elizabeth Strout: Olive, Again review - compassion, honesty and community

Jessica Payn

Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of...

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Ho Sok Fong: Lake Like A Mirror review - an intoxicating collection

Sarah Collins

“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short...

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John Grisham: The Guardians review - nail-bitingly good

Marina Vaizey

Some two million Americans are currently in prison in America. A disproportionate number are black and nearly 200,...

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Robert Service: Kremlin Winter review – behind Putin's masks

James Dowsett

When U.S. president George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he famously “saw his soul”. In his latest meditation on modern...

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Ted Gioia: Music: A Subversive History review – an informative, giddying ride

Sebastian Scotney

People who derive comfort from Classic FM’s strapline that European classical music is “The World's Greatest Music" are going to have a major problem with this book. American music historian...

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Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

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Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

Read more...

Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

Read more...

Caroline Moorehead: A House in the Mountains review – the women's war against Fascism

Boyd Tonkin

In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist...

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Irenosen Okojie: Nudibranch review - daring and surreal

Jessica Payn

Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly...

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