fri 29/03/2024

book reviews and features

Maria Reva: Good Citizens Need Not Fear review - tales of gloomy humour and absurdist charm

Jessica Payn

Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and...

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Khaled Nurul Hakim: The Book of Naseeb review – a bold debut

Daniel Baksi

A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from...

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'What Grandma said (Grandma’s Corona)': sonnets by Claudia Daventry

Claudia Daventry

A year plagued by Coronavirus is surely a time to dust off a seldom-aired...

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Caroline Maclean: Circles and Squares review - adventurous art, progressive living and a good gossip

Marina Vaizey

There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the...

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Rutger Bregman: Humankind, a Hopeful History review – nice guys finish first

Boyd Tonkin

In retrospect, we will surely see that British battles over the Covid-19 lockdown harboured within them a bitter but half-hidden war of ideas. On one side, the behavioural scientists who first...

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Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - III of III

theartsdesk

At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off...

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Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - II of III

theartsdesk

The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out...

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Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

theartsdesk

The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year...

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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld: The Discomfort of Evening review - lovelessness, loneliness, bodies and their limits

Jessica Payn

“I was ten and stopped taking off my coat.” This bare beginning marks the opening of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s startling and lyrical novel, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison: an...

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Alex George: The Paris Hours review - captivating yet frustrating

Charlie Stone

A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest...

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The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Marylebone Theatre review - f...

Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...

Bach's Easter Oratorio, OAE, Whelan, QEH review - the j...

Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter...

Album: Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle

“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...

The Origin of Evil review - Laure Calamy stars in gripping F...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a G...

In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...

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