mon 20/10/2025

book reviews and features

Kim Hye-jin: Concerning My Daughter review - room for complication

Rojbîn Arjen Yigit

In this best-selling Korean novella, recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin offers us the perspective of a Korean...

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Alyn Shipton: On Jazz - A Personal Journey - digging jazz deeply and musically

Sebastian Scotney

“I suppose you’re going to ask all the usual questions...?” When Keith Jarrett was interviewed by Alyn...

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Joanna Walsh: Girl Online - A User Manual review - how 'beatifoul' it is to be online

Hannah Hutching

Scrolling to the top of my Twitter DMs, most of which are from close friends or acquaintances, I notice the message request section flash “1”. It’s a signal I usually ignore, having learnt from...

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Laura Beatty: Looking for Theophrastus review - adventures in psychobiography

Hugh Barnes

Laura Beatty is a kind of Shirley Valentine figure in contemporary English literature. A decade and a half ago she published an astonishing debut novel entitled Pollard about female...

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Emily St John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility review - time travel, pandemics and the simulation hypothesis

Markie Robson-Scott

Emily St John Mandel’s wonderful novel of 2020, The Glass Hotel, featured people and places from her...

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Scholastique Mukasonga: The Barefoot Woman review - remembering Rwanda before 1994

Hannah Hutching

To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by...

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Extract: Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn began his translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, a novel by experimental Chilean artist Diamela Eltit, in January 2021. Considering the careful, difficult but not impossible “...

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Alejandro Zambra: Chilean Poet review - from here to paternity

Boyd Tonkin

Time-honoured advice warns actors never to work with children or animals. Perhaps the literary equivalent should tell novelists not to invent other writers in their books. Especially poets. Unless...

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Extract: Where My Feet Fall - Going For A Walk in Twenty Stories

Duncan Minshull

I began work on Where My Feet Fall a few months into the pandemic of 2020. After lockdown was announced we all became better walkers, and the collection took on greater resonance.

...

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Marianne Eloise: Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking review - bargaining with the devil

Annabel Bai Jackson

No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing,...

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