sat 05/07/2025

book reviews and features

Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake review - Macedonia's lacustrine heart

Jessica Payn

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...

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Tomasz Jedrowski: Swimming in the Dark review – of hypocrisy, both personal and systemic

Daniel Lewis

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...

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Albert Costa: The Bilingual Brain review – double-talking heads and what they tell us

Boyd Tonkin

Those of us who have to toil and sweat with other languages often feel a twinge of envy when we meet truly bilingual folk. That ability to switch codes, seemingly without any fuss, must confer so...

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Clemens Meyer: Dark Satellites review - eccentric orbits

James Dowsett

In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate...

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Ilya Kaminsky: Deaf Republic - silence as 'a soul's noise'

Jessica Payn

"The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing." This is one of two author’s "Notes" to Ilya Kaminsky’s latest...

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Jeet Thayil: Low – grief’s seedy distractions

Daniel Lewis

Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way. The poet,...

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Deborah Orr: Motherwell review - memoir, but so much more

India Lewis

Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s ...

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Francine Toon: Pine review – trauma and terror in the Highlands

Boyd Tonkin

Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as...

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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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