book reviews and features
Claire Tomalin: The Young H.G. Wells review – days of the comet
Wednesday, 17 November 2021
In late 1894 an unknown 28-year-old science tutor and wannabe writer finished a story in his dismal lodgings just north of Euston station. Divorced, after a brief, calamitous marriage to a cousin... Read more... |
Devin Jacobsen: Breath Like the Wind at Dawn review – the disturbances of the Civil War
Monday, 15 November 2021
How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective... Read more... |
Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness review - where the objects speak
Friday, 05 November 2021
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra... Read more... |
Mark Bould: The Anthropocene Unconscious review - climate anxiety is written everywhere
Tuesday, 02 November 2021
Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness... Read more... |
Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere - How We Became Post-Modern review - entertaining origin-story for the world of today
Tuesday, 02 November 2021
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story. “From the world of conventional signs... Read more... |
Selva Almada: Brickmakers review – men dying for love
Monday, 01 November 2021
To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural... Read more... |
Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands review - passion in the parchment
Wednesday, 13 October 2021
Outside Wales – even, perhaps, within it – few students will have run across the verse of Gwerful Mechain. The free-... Read more... |
Marcin Wicha: Things I Didn’t Throw Out review - the stories told by stacks of stuff
Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion... Read more... |
Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads review - can goodness ever be its own reward?
Monday, 11 October 2021
It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for... Read more... |
Sarah Hall: Burntcoat review - love after the end of the world
Saturday, 09 October 2021
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or... Read more... |
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Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling...
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I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American...