sun 26/10/2025

book reviews and features

Emma Cline: Daddy review - scintillating short stories by the author of The Girls

Markie Robson-Scott

The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story...

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Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto

James Dowsett

On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the...

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James Rebanks: English Pastoral, An Inheritance review - a manifesto for a radical agricultural rethink

India Lewis

Coming from a family of farmers, with periods of time spent working on a farm in the past ten years, I found James Rebanks’ English Pastoral: An Inheritance to be a highly...

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William Feaver: The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailed

Marina Vaizey

This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by...

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Nick Hornby: Just Like You review - funny but inauthentic Brexit novel

Sarah Collins

Nick Hornby’s protagonists are worlds apart. Joseph is a Black 22-year-old with a “portfolio career", which includes shift work at a butcher’s and a leisure centre and the distant dream of...

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Susanna Clarke: Piranesi review - the mysteries of the House

Boyd Tonkin

The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted...

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Matthew Sperling: Viral review - whip-smart satire about the void at the heart of tech

Daniel Lewis

Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already...

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Naomi Booth: Exit Management review - unwrapping life's unpleasantness

Lydia Bunt

When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of...

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Gabriel Pogrund & Patrick Maguire: Left Out review - story of Corbynism from 'Glastonbury to catastrophe'

James Dowsett

Readers of Left Out may be surprised to find out how much of party politics is conducted over WhatsApp. The Labour Party under Jeremy...

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Wayne Holloway-Smith: Love Minus Love review – powerfully excavating the tormented poet's psyche

Daniel Baksi

Roughly two years since ...

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