thu 30/11/2023

book reviews and features

Stanislav Aseyev: In Isolation - Dispatches from Occupied Donbas review - journeys through space and time in Ukraine

Hugh Barnes

Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring...

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Mieko Kawakami: All the Lovers in the Night review - the raw relatability of loneliness

Izzy Smith

Mieko Kawakami is the champion of the loner. Since achieving immense success in the UK with her translated works, she has become an indie fiction icon for her modern, visceral depictions of...

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Philip Ball: The Book of Minds review - thinking about the box

Jon Turney

Years ago, one of the leading mathematicians in the country tried to explain to me what his real work was like. When he was on the case, he said, he could be doing a range of other things – having...

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10 Questions for art historian and fiction writer Chloë Ashby

Hannah Hutching

“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut...

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Kim Hye-jin: Concerning My Daughter review - room for complication

Rojbîn Arjen Yigit

In this best-selling Korean novella, recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin offers us the perspective of a Korean...

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Alyn Shipton: On Jazz - A Personal Journey - digging jazz deeply and musically

Sebastian Scotney

“I suppose you’re going to ask all the usual questions...?” When Keith Jarrett was interviewed by Alyn...

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Joanna Walsh: Girl Online - A User Manual review - how 'beatifoul' it is to be online

Hannah Hutching

Scrolling to the top of my Twitter DMs, most of which are from close friends or acquaintances, I notice the message request section flash “1”. It’s a signal I usually ignore, having learnt from...

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Laura Beatty: Looking for Theophrastus review - adventures in psychobiography

Hugh Barnes

Laura Beatty is a kind of Shirley Valentine figure in contemporary English literature. A decade and a half ago she published an astonishing debut novel entitled Pollard about female...

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Emily St John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility review - time travel, pandemics and the simulation hypothesis

Markie Robson-Scott

Emily St John Mandel’s wonderful novel of 2020, The Glass Hotel, featured people and places from her...

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Scholastique Mukasonga: The Barefoot Woman review - remembering Rwanda before 1994

Hannah Hutching

To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by...

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latest in today

The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzl...

Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at The Almeida; she ends it with...

Album: Trevor Horn - Echoes: Ancient & Modern

A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly,...

Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Str...

This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and...

Grosvenor, Park, Ridout, Soltani, Wigmore Hall review - cham...

Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made...

Album: Peter Gabriel - I/O

Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up...

A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - older, wiser, and ye...

Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing...

Boat Story, BBC One review - once upon a time in Yorkshire

It was as long ago as January last year that the prolific Williams brothers,...

Dariescu, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Man...

John Storgårds found himself literally facing both ways for the third item on the BBC Philharmonic’s programme on Saturday: towards the audience,...

Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris review - a show...

The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition...

Blu-ray: King and Country

British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier...

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