sat 05/07/2025

book reviews and features

Yiyun Li: The Book of Goose - fame, reality and two teenage French girls

Markie Robson-Scott

The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li’s fifth novel, is the gripping story of two teenage French girls and their...

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Bronwyn Adcock: Currowan review - a fire foretold, a warning delivered

Harriet Mercer

In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country...

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'The first thing I do when I wake up is write.' Hilary Mantel, 1952-2022

Jasper Rees

Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won...

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Ken Auletta: Hollywood Ending - Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence review - if the tide had turned in 2002...

Sebastian Scotney

It was not until October 2017 that The New York Times ran a...

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Olivier Guez: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele review - the Nazi who was never found

India Lewis

Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into...

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Amalie Smith: Thread Ripper review - the tangled web we weave

Hannah Hutching

Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.

...

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Phoebe Power: Book of Days review - the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shell

Harriet Mercer

The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic...

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Jessie Burton: The House of Fortune review - a muted, sensitive sequel

India Lewis

A sequel is always a hard thing to write, especially if the book that precedes it is a bestseller, adapted for television and read by more than a million people. Yet Jessie Burton’s The House...

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Katya Adaui: Here Be Icebergs review - odd relations

India Lewis

The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an...

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Stanislav Aseyev: In Isolation - Dispatches from Occupied Donbas review - journeys through space and time in Ukraine

Hugh Barnes

Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring...

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