sun 27/07/2025

book reviews and features

Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

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Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

Read more...

Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

theartsdesk

Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former...

Read more...

Caroline Moorehead: A House in the Mountains review – the women's war against Fascism

Boyd Tonkin

In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist...

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Irenosen Okojie: Nudibranch review - daring and surreal

Jessica Payn

Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly...

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Julian Barnes: The Man in the Red Coat review – all that glitters…

Sarah Collins

“Chauvinism is the worst form of ignorance” is the maxim of Dr Pozzi, the hero of Julian Barnes’s latest book...

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Michael Connelly: The Night Fire review - unputdownable

Marina Vaizey

Ballard and Bosch sound like some dystopian upmarket commodity. They are, but deep in with the low life. They are Michael Connolly’s new duo of detectives, one in semi-disgrace, one retired. Throw...

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Benjamin Markovits: Christmas in Austin review – Essinger family reunion

Daniel Baksi

Paul Essinger has quit life as a professional tennis player and retired to his native Texas where, over the...

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Jung Chang: Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister review – China's century in three women's lives

Boyd Tonkin

In 1930, a couple of romantically involved Chinese expats in Berlin – both revolutionaries in their own way – went on a farewell date. One of them, Deng Yan-da, was due to return home to continue...

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Sarah Hall: Sudden Traveller review - lyrical and luminous

Jessica Payn

Movement, flight, searching, the quest for a destination: as its title might suggest, Sarah Hall’s latest ...

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