book reviews and features
Francine Toon: Pine review – trauma and terror in the Highlands
Sunday, 12 January 2020
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... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of ... Read more... |
Rosamund Lupton: Three Hours review - gripping thriller with a Macbeth twist
Saturday, 04 January 2020
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... Read more... |
Best of 2019: Books
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (... Read more... |
Michael Hunter: The Decline of Magic review - when mockery killed witches
Sunday, 29 December 2019
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,... Read more... |
Nalini Singh: A Madness of Sunshine review – a lacklustre thriller
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the... Read more... |
Eva Meijer: Animal Languages review - do you talk crow?
Sunday, 15 December 2019
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... Read more... |
Sema Kaygusuz: Every Fire You Tend review – an education in grief
Sunday, 15 December 2019
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... Read more... |
Elizabeth Strout: Olive, Again review - compassion, honesty and community
Sunday, 01 December 2019
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... Read more... |
Ho Sok Fong: Lake Like A Mirror review - an intoxicating collection
Sunday, 01 December 2019
“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... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Family Romance, LLC review - the chameleon blues
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan,...
Toast, Lawrence Batley Theatre online review - pungent adapt...
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of...
Les Blancs, National Theatre at Home review – triumphant rev...
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened...
Album: Polly Scattergood - In This Moment
A decade ago, Polly Scattergood was Mute Records’ newest, most-likely-to signing and, while she never crossed over like similar unconventional...
Theatre Lockdown Special 12: An American rarity, a British s...
Can this weekly lineup really now be three months old? As we move towards at least some degree of relaxation on the social restrictions that...
The Opera Story: Episodes review - whimsical takes on lockdo...
The Opera Story is an enterprising set-up based in London and founded with a mission to commission and stage...
Lynn + Lucy review - a bruising tale of female friendship
British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature...
Birdsong, The Original Theatre Company online review – a gut...
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling...
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, Sky Atlantic review - the go...
American history of the 1930s and ‘40s suddenly seems to be all the rage on TV, cropping up in the reborn Perry Mason, Das Boot...
Storyville: Welcome to Chechnya, BBC Four review - trauma, t...
David France’s revelatory film may have been subtitled “The...