thu 01/05/2025

book reviews and features

Devin Jacobsen: Breath Like the Wind at Dawn review – the disturbances of the Civil War

Jessica Payn

How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? 

For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective...

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Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness review - where the objects speak

CP Hunter

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra...

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Mark Bould: The Anthropocene Unconscious review - climate anxiety is written everywhere

Jon Turney

Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness...

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Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere - How We Became Post-Modern review - entertaining origin-story for the world of today

Daniel Baksi

In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story.

“From the world of conventional signs...

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Selva Almada: Brickmakers review – men dying for love

Boyd Tonkin

To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural...

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Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands review - passion in the parchment

Boyd Tonkin

Outside Wales – even, perhaps, within it – few students will have run across the verse of Gwerful Mechain. The free-...

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Marcin Wicha: Things I Didn’t Throw Out review - the stories told by stacks of stuff

Anna Parker

Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion...

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Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads review - can goodness ever be its own reward?

Markie Robson-Scott

It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for...

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Sarah Hall: Burntcoat review - love after the end of the world

India Lewis

Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or...

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First Person: Andrea Levy's husband recalls her path toward becoming a novelist

Bill Mayblin

The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song ...

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