book reviews and features
Ilya Kaminsky: Deaf Republic - silence as 'a soul's noise'
Sunday, 19 January 2020
"The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing." This is one of two author’s "Notes" to Ilya Kaminsky’s latest... Read more... |
Jeet Thayil: Low – grief’s seedy distractions
Sunday, 19 January 2020
Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way. The poet,... Read more... |
Deborah Orr: Motherwell review - memoir, but so much more
Saturday, 18 January 2020
Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s ... Read more... |
Francine Toon: Pine review – trauma and terror in the Highlands
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of ... Read more... |
Rosamund Lupton: Three Hours review - gripping thriller with a Macbeth twist
Saturday, 04 January 2020
This is not a drill. Lock down, evacuation. An active school shooter is on the loose, actually more than one: two or three men in balaclavas with automatic shotguns. But this isn’t a high school... Read more... |
Best of 2019: Books
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (... Read more... |
Michael Hunter: The Decline of Magic review - when mockery killed witches
Sunday, 29 December 2019
During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas,... Read more... |
Nalini Singh: A Madness of Sunshine review – a lacklustre thriller
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the... Read more... |
Eva Meijer: Animal Languages review - do you talk crow?
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Animal intelligence has come to the fore as an essential and fashionable subject for study. Dolphins, elephants, bees, prairie dogs, gannets, whales, baboons, wolves, parrots, bats – not mention... Read more... |
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