fri 29/03/2024

book reviews and features

Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts

Charlie Stone

Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of ...

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Rosamund Lupton: Three Hours review - gripping thriller with a Macbeth twist

Markie Robson-Scott

This is not a drill. Lock down, evacuation. An active school shooter is on the loose, actually more than one: two or three men in balaclavas with automatic shotguns. But this isn’t a high school...

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Best of 2019: Books

theartsdesk

In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (...

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Michael Hunter: The Decline of Magic review - when mockery killed witches

Boyd Tonkin

During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas,...

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Nalini Singh: A Madness of Sunshine review – a lacklustre thriller

Lauren Brown

Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the...

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Eva Meijer: Animal Languages review - do you talk crow?

Marina Vaizey

Animal intelligence has come to the fore as an essential and fashionable subject for study. Dolphins, elephants, bees, prairie dogs, gannets, whales, baboons, wolves, parrots, bats – not mention...

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Sema Kaygusuz: Every Fire You Tend review – an education in grief

Daniel Baksi

In March 1937, the government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk instigated what it called a “disciplinary campaign” against the Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds in the Dersim region of eastern...

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Elizabeth Strout: Olive, Again review - compassion, honesty and community

Jessica Payn

Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of...

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Ho Sok Fong: Lake Like A Mirror review - an intoxicating collection

Sarah Collins

“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short...

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John Grisham: The Guardians review - nail-bitingly good

Marina Vaizey

Some two million Americans are currently in prison in America. A disproportionate number are black and nearly 200,...

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Bach's Easter Oratorio, OAE, Whelan, QEH review – the j...

Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter...

Album: Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle

“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...

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A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

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In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...

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“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty...

Vossa Jazz 2024 review - Norwegian festival embraces William...

“The name of this group is Mayan Space Station.” In spite of the billing as The William Parker Trio, their bassist – coolly introducing himself as...

First person: playwright Paul Grellong on keeping pace with...

I’m writing this in the lobby of the...

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