sat 23/08/2025

book reviews and features

Christos Tsiolkas: Damascus review - the author of The Slap goes biblical

Markie Robson-Scott

To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're...

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Michael Nath: The Treatment review - 'deeds, and language, such as men do use'

Daniel Lewis

Great writing about – or set in – London has one thing in common: voice. It’s tuned into the city’s multiple...

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Pete Paphides: Broken Greek review - top of the pop memoirs

Owen Richards

Think of the phrase “music ...

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'You’re Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be'

Ariana Neumann

It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was...

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Imagining Ireland, Barbican review - raising women's voices

Tim Cumming

Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading...

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Panikos Panayi: Migrant City review – the capital of the world

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Patricia Grace: Potiki review – a searching examination of human nature

Daniel Baksi

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...

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Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel review - keycards to the heart of a woman in flight

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Jenny Offill: Weather review - the low hum of misgiving

Jessica Payn

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,...

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Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journey

Tom Birchenough

For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas...

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