book reviews and features
John Grisham: Camino Winds review - morality tale with a light touch
Sunday, 24 May 2020
John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “... Read more... |
Maria Reva: Good Citizens Need Not Fear review - tales of gloomy humour and absurdist charm
Tuesday, 19 May 2020
Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and... Read more... |
Khaled Nurul Hakim: The Book of Naseeb review – a bold debut
Sunday, 17 May 2020
A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from... Read more... |
'What Grandma said (Grandma’s Corona)': sonnets by Claudia Daventry
Sunday, 17 May 2020
A year plagued by Coronavirus is surely a time to dust off a seldom-aired... Read more... |
Caroline Maclean: Circles and Squares review - adventurous art, progressive living and a good gossip
Monday, 11 May 2020
There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the... Read more... |
Rutger Bregman: Humankind, a Hopeful History review – nice guys finish first
Sunday, 10 May 2020
In retrospect, we will surely see that British battles over the Covid-19 lockdown harboured within them a bitter but half-hidden war of ideas. On one side, the behavioural scientists who first... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - III of III
Friday, 08 May 2020
At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - II of III
Wednesday, 06 May 2020
The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Monday, 04 May 2020
The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year... Read more... |
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld: The Discomfort of Evening review - lovelessness, loneliness, bodies and their limits
Sunday, 03 May 2020
“I was ten and stopped taking off my coat.” This bare beginning marks the opening of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s startling and lyrical novel, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison: an... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
The Vast of Night review - perfectly paranoid
The Vast of Night’s premise scarcely guarantees originality. Non-science-fiction buffs scoping Amazon’s film listings will probably move...
Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres, virtual tour review - tantali...
Salvador Dalí’s house at Portlligat on the Costa Brava is straight out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine, its sunbaked white walls dazzling in...
Album: Bab L'Bluz - Nayda
Bab L’Bluz are a Franco-Moroccan band, They’re the latest in a succession of musicians - going back to the pioneers Nass El Ghiwane, and the...
This House, National Theatre at Home review – timely revival...
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames ...
Krabi, 2562 review - a trance-like visitation
Have you ever visited a destination you saw on film, only to realise it’s not quite how you imagined? Filled with tourists, the scars of mass...
Classical music/Opera direct to home 13 - piano marathons an...
In an atmosphere of uncertainty created by a government desperate to boost the economy despite the COVID-19 infection rate not reducing...
Space Force, Netflix review - fails to launch
Since Donald Trump's election as US President in 2016, I...
The Uncertain Kingdom review - Britannia agonistes
The Uncertain Kingdom is a VOD anthology of 20 short films...
Album: Lady Gaga - Chromatica
Lady Gaga proclaimed by Tweet that her sixth album represents her “absolute love of...