sat 02/11/2024

book reviews and features

Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trend

CP Hunter

Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as...

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Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power

Jack Barron

Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: ...

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Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit

India Lewis

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based...

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Caitlin Merrett King: Always Open Always Closed review - looking for an approach while trying to do the approach

Alice Brewer

Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins...

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Marie Darrieussecq: Sleepless review - in search of lost sleep

Jack Barron

“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into...

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Tony Williams: Cole the Magnificent - fantastical tale blends myth, poetry and comedy

Bernard Hughes

Cole the Magnificent is a picaresque, fantastical tale of the life (or lives) of a man, Cole, following...

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Masha Karp: George Orwell and Russia review - dystopia's reality

Hugh Barnes

The war in Ukraine, which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin insists on calling a “special military operation”, may have given fresh urgency to...

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Henry Hoke: Open Throat review - if a lion could speak

India Lewis

I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it...

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First Person: Marc Burrows on getting to know Sir Terry Pratchett

Marc Burrows

In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.

My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest...

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Lorrie Moore: I am Homeless If This is Not My Home review - between this world and the next

India Lewis

Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek...

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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Guards at the Taj, Orange Tree Theatre review - miniature ma...

It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As...

Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex worker

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean...

Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, La Nuova Musica, Bates, Wigmore Hal...

Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity...

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+...

Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made...

Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter London

Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was...

The Buddha of Suburbia, Barbican Theatre review - farcical f...

Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost...

Small Things Like These review - less is more in stirring Ir...

There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’...

Album: Willie Nelson - Last Leaf on the Tree

Well, seems like only yesterday when I reviewed Willie Nelson’s last album, Borderline, an excellent set from the man’s ninth decade, and...

Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for M...

How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after...

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