wed 13/08/2025

book reviews and features

Joseph Mazur: The Clock Mirage review – brief histories of time

Boyd Tonkin

The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always...

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Margarita García Robayo: Holiday Heart review – understated and acute

Jessica Payn

The epigraph chosen for Holiday Heart locates the book within the tense of an “afterwards”: not passion, but what follows, the wakeful lull and wide-eyed studying of another, in which...

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Yuri Herrera: A Silent Fury review – the fire last time

Boyd Tonkin

History, as protestors around the world currently insist, can be the art of forgetting – and erasure – as much as of memory. Although it explores a single incident from a century ago, Yuri Herrera...

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Book extract: Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo translated by Charlotte Coombe

theartsdesk

Holiday heart, instead of sentimental love discovered on vacation, describes a faltering organ, overloaded from excess consumption: a heart at risk. In Margarita Garcia Robayo’s brilliantly...

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Matthew Kneale: Pilgrims review – adventures on the road to Rome

Boyd Tonkin

Some things really never change. After a blatant cheat perpetrated by a well-connected lout, one of the humblest pilgrims in Matthew Kneale’s band reminds us that “rich folks’ justice is a penny...

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Moyra Davey: Index Cards review – fragments of the artist

Daniel Baksi

Moyra Davey’s biographical note, included in Fitzcarraldo Editions’ copy of Index Cards, describes “a New...

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Keiichiro Hirano: A Man review - the best kind of thriller

Charlie Stone

Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man has all the trappings of a gripping detective story: a bereaved wife, a...

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John Grisham: Camino Winds review - morality tale with a light touch

Marina Vaizey

John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “...

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Maria Reva: Good Citizens Need Not Fear review - tales of gloomy humour and absurdist charm

Jessica Payn

Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and...

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Khaled Nurul Hakim: The Book of Naseeb review – a bold debut

Daniel Baksi

A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from...

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