Books
Boyd Tonkin
The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted together”. Each of its Halls measures “approximately 200 metres in length and 120 metres wide” (pretty much the Golden Ratio of classical art and architecture). Alcoves and niches in each Hall contain a multitude of symbolic Statues that resemble Baroque tableaux of ancient myths. Piranesi’s favourites include “the Gorilla, the Young Boy playing the Cymbals, the Woman carrying a Beehive, the Elephant Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already have a tinge of sepia about them. Set in a bustling east Berlin, this sharply plotted tale of start-up bliss and blunder, then bliss again, sees characters commuting on public transport, working in an office, attending first-thing-in-the-morning “hype sessions” to run-of-the-mill meetings, bouncing in and out of bar-cafes, going on dates in restaurants, jetsetting on same-day return flights, and schmoozing potential clients and buyers at soirees buoyed by champagne, canapes (the least “safe Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of those books that you want to read very quickly, its writing slickly modern and its characters compellingly flawed. Lauren is a graduate HR employee specialising in the tricky task of making people redundant. She comes from humble beginnings, but wants to put all that behind her, focusing on the dream apartment and the adjoining shiny City life. Callum is a university drop-out who works in guest hospitality, tending rental properties for the rich and famous before Read more ...
James Dowsett
Readers of Left Out may be surprised to find out how much of party politics is conducted over WhatsApp. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn had an encrypted chat for every occasion – whether it was to smear a colleague, to slime the “scumbag” press, or (as was the case with two rogue party staffers) to plot the demise of the “Project” from the inside. In their new book, The Times’ Patrick Maguire and Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund exploit their access to dozens of party insiders and a myriad of leaks in order to tell the story of the Labour Party from “Glastonbury to catastrophe.”An 860-page Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Roughly two years since “the posh mums are boxing in the square” scooped first place in the 2018 National Poetry Competition, Wayne Holloway-Smith returns with Love Minus Love, his second full-length collection. The follow-up to Alarum (2017) includes that competition winner, which describes the magical revival of a cancer-stricken mother, sent into the boxing ring against the very tumour that threatens her life. Now, it is but one of many standout poems in this highly personal exploration of anxiety, broken families, and masculine fraility.If the voice of “the posh mums” performed its Read more ...
Katie da Cunha Lewin
Selva Almada’s newly translated work has a stark title in both English and the original Spanish: Dead Girls, or Chicas Muertas. That apparent bluntness belies the hybrid sensitivity that makes up the pages. Its subject matter is the murders of three young women during the 1980s, spread across different provinces of Argentina, a country where murders of and violence against women are unbearably commonplace. This book, originally published in 2014 and now out in a translation by Annie McDermott from Charco Press, gives space to what is left over: the immediate grief, shock, and confusion that Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Katharina Volckmer’s début novel The Appointment follows one woman as she vents her frustrations, confusions and regrets to her doctor during a lengthy appointment in London. Ranging through ideas from sex to Nazism, religion to technology, this novel provides a panorama of modern life via the deeply personal journey of its narrator, and frames the highs and lows of human existence with vibrancy and humour. Volckmer offers a refreshing view on many themes that are traditionally approached with the utmost trepidation. At times breathless, other times pensive, this is a book whose tone varies Read more ...
Gaby Frost
What stands between Beirut and the moon? Between Lebanon’s capital and the limitless possibility beyond? It is a question as complex and immense as the nation itself. In the wake of the devastating explosion on 4 August, as well as longstanding government corruption and an unprecedented economic crash, it feels, now more than ever, as though the answer is: everything.The beauty of A. Naji Bakhti’s Between Beirut and the Moon is that it refuses to take the easy route. It embraces the city’s paradoxes and complexities, acknowledges its defects and limitations, and celebrates its freedoms and Read more ...
Lucy Popescu
“The challenges of the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains. If you stand too close, you won’t be able to see their peaks. Once you step away from the currents of life, you will have the full view…” This is the advice a grandmother offers to her beloved granddaughter in Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s lyrical family saga. Born in North Việt Nam, Nguyễn won a scholarship to study in Australia and currently lives in Jakarta. Aged thirty-nine, she wrote The Mountains Sing in English rather than her Vietnamese mother tongue. These factors presumably offered the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
"The gateway to the invisible must be visible." So intones Patti Smith on the third and final journey in sound with Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, AKA Soundwalk Collective, musical psychogeographers and field recorders whose journey for this evocation of French spiritual-surrealist writer Rene Daumal’s posthumous 1952 cult classic Mount Analog took him to the peak of Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, the former Beatle hangout of Rishikesh, India’s "spiritual capital" of Varanasi, and Upper Mustang, once known as the Kingdom of Lo, which only admitted its first foreign visitors in 1992 Read more ...
David Nice
The protagonist is a Neapolitan teenage girl; the settings move between the upper and lower parts, from the Vomero area on the hill to the industrial zone, of a city which has long been the main territory of the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante. We know her through her “writer’s journey” Frantumaglia as irrefutably a woman from Naples - “an extension of the body,” as she describes it there, “a matrix of perception, the term of comparison of every experience”. So it is that, as with all great fiction, the local touches on the universal, surely striking chords with everyone, male or Read more ...
India Lewis
Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald’s first book following her incredibly successful memoir H is for Hawk in 2014, is an excellent collection of short pieces focused on the natural world. It’s wonderful to read a book on this subject, especially one by a woman writer, in a genre which (with notable exceptions like Kathleen Jamie) dominated by men. Macdonald has an anecdotal style, dense with information and delicately poetic. She also writes with great humour: I snorted with laughter at her chapter “Goats”. Vesper Flights is perhaps not as engaging as H is for Hawk, especially for those readers Read more ...