thu 10/07/2025

book reviews and features

Svetlana Alexievich: Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories review - anything but childish

Katherine Waters

Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with...

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Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous review – the new avant-garde

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because...

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Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler review - a racy life pacily narrated

David Nice

Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel...

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Anthony B. Atkinson: Measuring Poverty Around the World review - first, second and third world problems

Liz Thomson

Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably...

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Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad review - a Soviet national epic

Tom Birchenough

Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on...

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Hiromi Kawakami: The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino review - Don Juan as a salaryman

Boyd Tonkin

My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That...

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Thomas Harris: Cari Mora review – mayhem in Miami

Boyd Tonkin

This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road...

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Mike Jay: Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic review - multiple perspectives

Katherine Waters

Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to...

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Ben Okri, Brighton Festival 2019 review - adventures in writing

Katie Colombus

If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival...

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Leah Hazard: Hard Pushed review - a midwife's tales

Marina Vaizey

This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is...

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