sat 19/07/2025

book reviews and features

Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addiction

India Lewis

Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-...

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Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC review - we won't know what we've got until it's gone

Liz Thomson

When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over...

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Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'

theartsdesk

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in...

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Nicole Krauss: To Be a Man review - first short-story collection from the award-winning novelist

Markie Robson-Scott

Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection...

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Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

India Lewis

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,...

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Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois

theartsdesk

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to...

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Ben Wilson: Metropolis - A History of Humankind's Greatest Invention review - urban resilience throughout the ages

Daniel Lewis

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived...

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Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology review - wild writing to stimulate the senses

Daniel Lewis

Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes...

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Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world

David Nice

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the...

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Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time

India Lewis

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy...

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