tue 14/10/2025

book reviews and features

Teju Cole: Blind Spot review - haunting hybrid of words and images

Boyd Tonkin

As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding,...

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Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'

Lisa Jewell

I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a...

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h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstream

Liz Thomson

For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started...

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Peter Høeg: The Susan Effect review - Nordic noir turns surreal

Jasper Rees

Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s...

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Sarah Hall: Madame Zero review – eerie tales of calamity and change

Boyd Tonkin

Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to...

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Enter theartsdesk's Young Reviewer of the Year Award

theartsdesk

The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art...

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Michael Connelly: The Late Show review - mesmerising and believable characters

Marina Vaizey

Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter...

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Danny Goldberg: In Search of the Lost Chord review - 1967 well remembered

Liz Thomson

I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the...

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Eureka: novelist Anthony Quinn on completing his acclaimed trilogy

Anthony Quinn

I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist,...

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Jonathan Miles: St Petersburg review - culture and calamity

Marina Vaizey

Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same...

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