book reviews and features

Panikos Panayi: Migrant City review – the capital of the world

Boyd Tonkin Sunday, 23 February 2020

Some menus never change. In 1910, the Loyal British Waiters Society came into being, prompted by “xenophobic resentment at the dominance of foreigners in the restaurant trade”. London’s German...

Patricia Grace: Potiki review – a searching examination of human nature

Daniel Baksi Sunday, 23 February 2020

With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades...

Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel review - keycards to the heart of a woman in flight

Boyd Tonkin Sunday, 09 February 2020

Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to...

Jenny Offill: Weather review - the low hum of misgiving

Jessica Payn Sunday, 09 February 2020

Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather,...

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journey

Tom Birchenough Sunday, 09 February 2020

For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas...

Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retold

Florence Hallett Thursday, 06 February 2020

These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of...

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

Jessica Payn Sunday, 02 February 2020

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...

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

Daniel Lewis Sunday, 02 February 2020

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...

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

Boyd Tonkin Sunday, 26 January 2020

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...