book reviews and features
'You’re Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be'
Monday, 24 February 2020
It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was... Read more... |
Imagining Ireland, Barbican review - raising women's voices
Monday, 24 February 2020
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading... Read more... |
Panikos Panayi: Migrant City review – the capital of the world
Sunday, 23 February 2020
Some menus never change. In 1910, the Loyal British Waiters Society came into being, prompted by “xenophobic resentment at the dominance of foreigners in the restaurant trade”. London’s German... Read more... |
Patricia Grace: Potiki review – a searching examination of human nature
Sunday, 23 February 2020
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades... Read more... |
Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel review - keycards to the heart of a woman in flight
Sunday, 09 February 2020
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to... Read more... |
Jenny Offill: Weather review - the low hum of misgiving
Sunday, 09 February 2020
Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather,... Read more... |
Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journey
Sunday, 09 February 2020
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas... Read more... |
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retold
Thursday, 06 February 2020
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of... Read more... |
Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake review - Macedonia's lacustrine heart
Sunday, 02 February 2020
To the Lake, Kassabova titles this book, but the journey it unfolds tells of not one ancient lake but two: “twins” Ohrid and Prespa, the Lake of Light and the Vale of Snow; these siblings... Read more... |
Tomasz Jedrowski: Swimming in the Dark review – of hypocrisy, both personal and systemic
Sunday, 02 February 2020
Conjuring up nostalgia for a past readers never had is, perhaps, the litmus test for any good coming-of-age story. Writers have the hard task of making the general particular – because growing up... Read more... |
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latest in today
Album: St Vincent - All Born Screaming
The thing with Annie Clark, better known as the triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St Vincent, is that much like an actual saint the...
Album: St Vincent - All Born Screaming
The thing with Annie Clark, better known as the triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St Vincent, is that much like an actual saint the...
Eye to Eye: Homage to Ernst Scheidegger, MASI Lugano review...
With a troubled gaze and a lived-in face, the portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti on a withdrawn...
Christian Pierre La Marca, Yaman Okur, St Martin-in-The-Fiel...
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians...
That They May Face The Rising Sun review - lyrical adaptatio...
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the...
Album: Pet Shop Boys - Nonetheless
This album came with an absolutely enormous promo campaign. As well as actual advertising there were “Audience With…” events, and specials on BBC...
Ridout, Włoszczowska, Crawford, Lai, Posner, Wigmore Hall re...
Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/...
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...