literature
Helen Tyson
Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...
Claudia Bull
How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.In 1992, hoping to counter the “strange and erroneous” accounts of her Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).Unsurprisingly, however, it began to fizzle out after the invention of the telephone. In 1984, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published her epistolary novel The City and the House (La città e la casa), and the action, such as it is Read more ...
Jack Barron
I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s increasingly unhinged approach to impartiality. Of course, similar sentences can be heard in cafés and pubs across the country, and on social media, and within our homes, as we struggle more and more to negotiate truth’s withering state.Poets have always wondered and worried about this, theirs being a world poised at the edge of meaning. Tom Read more ...
David Nice
It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.This year, four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Read more ...
James Saynor
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year – from gushing BBC documentaries to actually quite witty Hallmark cable movies – France offers up Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a cordial, low-energy rom com that sets out to Austenify the lovelorn of Paris.In Laura Piani’s debut feature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works at the Shakespeare and Company English bookshop on the Left Bank and is a ultra- Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic buds, blooms and supersize tubers reflect a deep, tropical past that predates the very English landscape we now associate with this part of the world.So artist Vanessa da Silva invites you to reconnect with 300 million years of history by sitting here a while. When the sun is out, as it was on the opening weekend of Bradford 2025, you might reflect Read more ...
Leila Greening
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the Swiss Alps across disparate fragments of prose, converging occasionally with five central characters.Gahse captures conversations in mountain refuges, in cars traversing steep cliffs, on journeys to ragged quarries or distant hikes across granite. Many of these notes are gestural. Note 229, for instance, reads, in full, "I am more of an observer of Read more ...
Leila Greening
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.In the wake of her father’s death, a woman returns to the small Greek town where she mourned her mother nine years earlier. The narratives of her two trips are interwoven, as the events of the second provoke reflections Read more ...
Jon Turney
Working on materials was basic to human culture from the start: chipping at flint to make a hand-axe; fashioning bone or wood; drying hides. In time, people discovered that some materials, especially when put to trial by fire, were special: harder, shinier, more attractive, or more deadly.Philip Marsden is interested in those materials, yes, but especially in the now-buried traces of their excavation. And his latest book – Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder – is interestingly difficult to characterise. It’s a blend (an alloy?) of geology, archaeology, Read more ...
India Lewis
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.There are obvious cliches in the familial "saga" genre, which at times can make the book feel a little artificial, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating, often heartbreaking tale. We open with the traumatic loss of the Cora’s father in the chaos of 9/11. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Billie Holiday sings again, Olivia Laing tends to her garden, and Biran Klaas takes a chance: our reviewers discuss their favourite reads of 2024.Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber, £30) delivers handsomely on the promise of its subtitle: a journey through global music. The veteran producer and promoter has been soaking up the varied music of many cultures since long before that problematic term “world music” was invented. I was hooked on his border-hopping conspectus of much of the most interesting music of the last century from the opening long chapter on South Read more ...