wed 24/09/2025

book reviews and features

Goran Vojnović: The Fig Tree review - falling apart together as Yugoslavia splits

Boyd Tonkin

Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about...

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theartsdesk Q&A: poet laureate Simon Armitage on landscapes, libraries, home and edgelands

India Lewis

Simon Armitage is a poet at the top of his game: in his second year as poet laureate, he has given voice to the...

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Don DeLillo: The Silence review - when the lights of technology go out

India Lewis

Don DeLillo’s latest novella, The Silence, has been marketed with an emphasis on its prescience, describing the...

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Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incomplete

Lydia Bunt

As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of...

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Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addiction

India Lewis

Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-...

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Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC review - we won't know what we've got until it's gone

Liz Thomson

When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over...

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Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'

theartsdesk

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in...

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Nicole Krauss: To Be a Man review - first short-story collection from the award-winning novelist

Markie Robson-Scott

Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection...

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Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

India Lewis

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,...

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Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois

theartsdesk

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to...

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