thu 14/08/2025

book reviews and features

Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening review - after thoughts

Jack Barron

Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive...

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Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More review - fuel for thought

Jon Turney

If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come...

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Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings review - a gift that keeps on giving

Hugh Barnes

In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and...

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Jonathan Coe: The Proof of My Innocence review - a whodunnit with a difference

Bernard Hughes

Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema

Harry Thorfinn-

You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-...

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Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose

Issy Brooks-Ward

In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected...

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Stevie Smith: Not Waving But Drowning review - riding the wave

Jack Barron

Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it.

In fact, Faber &...

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Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulable

Issy Brooks-Ward

How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a...

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Claire Messud: This Strange Eventful History review - home is where the heart was

India Lewis

Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is...

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Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop - The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year review - setting the record straight

John Carvill

It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.

In this fine, clear-eyed...

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