book reviews and features
Panikos Panayi: Migrant City review – the capital of the world
Sunday, 23 February 2020
Some menus never change. In 1910, the Loyal British Waiters Society came into being, prompted by “xenophobic resentment at the dominance of foreigners in the restaurant trade”. London’s German... Read more... |
Patricia Grace: Potiki review – a searching examination of human nature
Sunday, 23 February 2020
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades... Read more... |
Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel review - keycards to the heart of a woman in flight
Sunday, 09 February 2020
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to... Read more... |
Jenny Offill: Weather review - the low hum of misgiving
Sunday, 09 February 2020
Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather,... Read more... |
Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journey
Sunday, 09 February 2020
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas... Read more... |
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retold
Thursday, 06 February 2020
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of... Read more... |
Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake review - Macedonia's lacustrine heart
Sunday, 02 February 2020
To the Lake, Kassabova titles this book, but the journey it unfolds tells of not one ancient lake but two: “twins” Ohrid and Prespa, the Lake of Light and the Vale of Snow; these siblings... Read more... |
Tomasz Jedrowski: Swimming in the Dark review – of hypocrisy, both personal and systemic
Sunday, 02 February 2020
Conjuring up nostalgia for a past readers never had is, perhaps, the litmus test for any good coming-of-age story. Writers have the hard task of making the general particular – because growing up... Read more... |
Albert Costa: The Bilingual Brain review – double-talking heads and what they tell us
Sunday, 26 January 2020
Those of us who have to toil and sweat with other languages often feel a twinge of envy when we meet truly bilingual folk. That ability to switch codes, seemingly without any fuss, must confer so... Read more... |
Clemens Meyer: Dark Satellites review - eccentric orbits
Sunday, 26 January 2020
In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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