thu 24/04/2025

book reviews and features

Thora Hjörleifsdóttir: Magma review - love burns in debut novel from Iceland

India Lewis

Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma is certainly not an easy read. It describes, in short chapters...

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10 Questions for novelist Mieko Kawakami

Izzy Smith

Mieko Kawakami sits firmly amongst the Japanese literati for her sharp and pensive depictions of life in...

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Samantha Walton: Everybody Needs Beauty review - the well of the world

Nell Whittaker

In the opening poem of Samantha Walton's 2018 collection, Self Heal, the speaker is on the tube, that evergreen metaphor of capital's specific barrelling momentum. The tube "will...

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Test Signal: Northern Anthology of New Writing review – core writing from England's regions

Daniel Baksi

“On the Ordinance Survey map, it has no name”, writes Andrew Michael Hurley, of the wood that nevertheless gives its name to his essay. “Clavicle Wood” provides the first chapter in the ...

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Adam Mars-Jones: Batlava Lake review - pride and prejudice in the Kosovo War

Zehra Kazmi

For a slim book of some 100 pages, Batlava Lake by Adam Mars-Jones is deceptively meandering. The novella is narrated by Barry Ashton, an engineer attached to the British Army troops...

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Danielle Evans: The Office of Historical Corrections review - what happens when history comes knocking

Daniel Lewis

There’s something refreshing about fiction you can easily trace back to the question what if...

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Anna Neima: The Utopians review – after horror, six quests for the good life

Boyd Tonkin

Not long after the Nazis came to power, Eberhard Arnold sent a manifesto to Adolf Hitler. The Protestant preacher urged the dictator to “embrace universal love”. With his wife Emmy, Eberhard had...

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Victoria Mas: The Mad Women's Ball review - compelling plot meets disquieting history

Gaby Frost

To this day, if you take a stroll down Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital, you’ll come across an imposing building: the...

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Extract: David Lan's As If By Chance

David Lan

In June 2001 the London Festival of International Theatre brought Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Alive from ...

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Elinor Cleghorn: Unwell Women review – misunderstanding and misdiagnosis

Lydia Bunt

I’m one of the women in the pages of Elinor Cleghorn’s new history of the female body, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. I’ve dealt with strange...

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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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