tue 08/07/2025

book reviews and features

Esther Freud: I Couldn't Love You More review - the alternative history of a pregnancy

Markie Robson-Scott

The glamorous unreliability of Esther Freud’s father, Lucian Freud, is an inescapable force in her...

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Music books to end lockdown: Sam Lee, Hawkwind, Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Electric Muses

Tim Cumming

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and...

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Sam Riviere: Dead Souls review – whip-smart literary satire with a techno tinge

Boyd Tonkin

In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to...

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Lucy Caldwell: Intimacies review - exploring the empty spaces

Lydia Bunt

In the first short story of Lucy Caldwell’s collection Intimacies, “Like This”, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a parent occurs. On the spur of a stressful...

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Maylis de Kerangal: Painting Time review - safer in simulation

Charlie Stone

"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is...

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The Pursuit of Love, BBC One review - extravagantly entertaining

Matt Wolf

Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious...

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Sunjeev Sahota: China Room review - separate, related lives

India Lewis

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the...

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Extract: Blackface by Ayanna Thompson

theartsdesk

Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by...

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Kate Lebo: The Book of Difficult Fruit review - a rich, juicy delight

Jessica Payn

Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it...

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Michael Spitzer: The Musical Human review - charting our age-old relationship with music

Jon Turney

Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become....

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