thu 03/07/2025

book reviews and features

Sunday Book: Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Legacy

David Nice

Anyone who's followed Yrsa's earlier novels, many of them featuring down-to-earth attorney Thora...

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Sunday Book: Helen Dunmore - Birdcage Walk

Boyd Tonkin

Birdcage Walk in Bristol really exists. It runs under an arched canopy of branches though a long-disused graveyard in Clifton. At this eerie spot, all that remains of the blitzed church of St...

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Sunday Book: George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo

Markie Robson-Scott

George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of...

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Sunday Book: Yiyun Li - Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Liz Thomson

Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years...

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Sunday Book: Jake Arnott - The Fatal Tree

Matthew Wright

Novelist Jake Arnott has an eye for seedy glamour. The Fatal Tree takes the 1720s underworld - the setting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, one of the most successful...

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'My father Sabahattin Ali is being rediscovered'

Filiz Ali

I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria....

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Sunday Book: Philip Hook - Rogues' Gallery

Florence Hallett

The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather...

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The private life of Stefan Zweig in England

Jasper Rees

On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest...

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Sunday Book: Neil Gaiman - Norse Mythology

Boyd Tonkin

Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and...

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Sunday Book: Daniel Levitin - A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics

Peter Forbes

Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV...

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