wed 27/08/2025

book reviews and features

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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Kelly Clancy: Playing with Reality - How Games Shape Our World review - how far games go back

Jon Turney

For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual...

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Hugo Rifkind: Rabbits review - 31 wild parties and a funeral

Bernard Hughes

In some ways I’m an appropriate person to review Hugo Rifkind’s new novel Rabbits, a coming-of-age comedy set in the early...

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Extract: Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H....

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Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review - a view from the boundaries

Bernard Hughes

In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read...

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Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new world

Jon Turney

Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a...

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Heather McCalden: The Observable Universe review - reflections from a damaged life

India Lewis

Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the...

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Dorian Lynskey: Everything Must Go review - it's the end of the world as we know it

Bernard Hughes

According to REM in 1987, “It’s the end of the world as we know it”. And while they sang about topical preoccupations – hurricanes, wildfires and plane crashes – they were really just varying a...

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Andrew O'Hagan: Caledonian Road review - London's Dickensian return

India Lewis

Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very...

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Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inconceivable

Jack Barron

"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by...

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