sat 08/02/2025

book reviews and features

Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power

Jack Barron

Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: ...

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Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit

India Lewis

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based...

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Caitlin Merrett King: Always Open Always Closed review - looking for an approach while trying to do the approach

Alice Brewer

Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins...

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Marie Darrieussecq: Sleepless review - in search of lost sleep

Jack Barron

“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into...

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Tony Williams: Cole the Magnificent - fantastical tale blends myth, poetry and comedy

Bernard Hughes

Cole the Magnificent is a picaresque, fantastical tale of the life (or lives) of a man, Cole, following...

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Masha Karp: George Orwell and Russia review - dystopia's reality

Hugh Barnes

The war in Ukraine, which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin insists on calling a “special military operation”, may have given fresh urgency to...

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Henry Hoke: Open Throat review - if a lion could speak

India Lewis

I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it...

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First Person: Marc Burrows on getting to know Sir Terry Pratchett

Marc Burrows

In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.

My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest...

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Lorrie Moore: I am Homeless If This is Not My Home review - between this world and the next

India Lewis

Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek...

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Nick Laird: Up Late review - attention lapses

Alice Brewer

A few pages before the titular poem of Up Late, Nick Laird describes a haircut in a bathroom mirror, and finds a possible art form reflected back: "something like a poem / glances back /...

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