book reviews and features
Sigrid Rausing: Mayhem review - you want it darker?Sunday, 03 September 2017
There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher,... Read more... |
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent review - dark and expert crime writingSunday, 27 August 2017
Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since... Read more... |
Omar Robert Hamilton: The City Always Wins review - Egypt's revolution, up close and personalSunday, 20 August 2017
A few days ago we learned that British taxpayers have unwittingly donated around £1m. in aid to the police and court systems of Egypt’s military dictatorship, via an opaque “Conflict, Stability... Read more... |
Fred Vargas: The Accordionist review - intriguing Gallic sleuthing yarnSunday, 13 August 2017
The two haunting series of crime ... Read more... |
James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasmSunday, 06 August 2017
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of... Read more... |
Jason Webster: Fatal Sunset review - more flavoursome crime in ValenciaSunday, 06 August 2017
The sixth in a series of crime... Read more... |
Emma Dibdin: 'Being scared of something is a sign you should write about it'Saturday, 05 August 2017
When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I... Read more... |
Teju Cole: Blind Spot review - haunting hybrid of words and imagesSunday, 30 July 2017
As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding,... Read more... |
Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'Sunday, 30 July 2017
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstreamTuesday, 25 July 2017
For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started... Read more... |
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In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of ...
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to...
Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...
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...
“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...
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...
The screenwriting debut of actor Andrew Buchan,...
A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...
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...