literature
Jonathan Buckley: One Boat review - a shore thingTuesday, 11 March 2025
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound... Read more... |
Philip Marsden: Under a Metal Sky review - rock and aweTuesday, 11 February 2025
Working on materials was basic to human culture from the start: chipping at flint to make a hand-axe; fashioning bone or wood; drying hides. In time, people discovered that some materials, especially when put to trial by fire, were special: harder,... Read more... |
Catherine Airey: Confessions review - the crossroads we bearTuesday, 28 January 2025
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space... Read more... |
Best of 2024: BooksTuesday, 31 December 2024
Billie Holiday sings again, Olivia Laing tends to her garden, and Biran Klaas takes a chance: our reviewers discuss their favourite reads of 2024.Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber, £30) delivers handsomely on the promise... Read more... |
Jeff Young: Wild Twin review - a box of tricksWednesday, 27 November 2024
The writer, performer, and lecturer Jeff Young’s latest, Wild Twin, tells – ostensibly – the story of his barefoot, Beat-imitative journey through northern Europe in the 1980s. However, it is, at heart, a greater tale of his return, to family and to... Read more... |
Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening review - after thoughtsTuesday, 19 November 2024
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive single thought, uttered always in a characteristically... Read more... |
Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid proseTuesday, 22 October 2024
In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected upon the special kind of paranoia that attends the ill individual. Each person is, by virtue of "being a little world", supremely conscious of a... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: The Sound Inside / So YoungTuesday, 13 August 2024
The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a... Read more... |
Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulableFriday, 19 July 2024
How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a question that Ellen McWilliams, in her highly moving and humorous memoir, takes not only seriously but as... Read more... |
Heather McCalden: The Observable Universe review - reflections from a damaged lifeTuesday, 16 April 2024
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 subsequent loss of her maternal grandmother, Nivia, who raised... Read more... |
Andrew O'Hagan: Caledonian Road review - London's Dickensian returnTuesday, 02 April 2024
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very least has designs on being a seminal work, documenting the modern (European) human condition. Character and storyline-rich, dense, and morally... Read more... |
David Harsent: Skin review - our strange surfacesSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries... Read more... |
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