literature
Hugh Barnes
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The technical term for this is poetic licence because Leighton’s birthday falls on 23rd February, and Russia’s invasion of that particular "elsewhere" didn’t happen until the following day. Strictly speaking, the poem can’t be true. Leighton’s birthday was as quiet and uneventful in Ukraine as it was anywhere else.One of the strengths, however, of Angela Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias Énard’s sprawling, massy, magisterial tales of death and life, and love, this sense of endless decay and rebirth assumes many faces, only some of them cruel.The novel begins conventionally enough. We are introduced to the rather petulant, yet self-mocking voice of our protagonist and hapless anthropologist, David Mazon, via the form of his " Read more ...
Lucy Thynne
Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might sound reductive – as though every writer is a kind of one-trick pony – but it’s meant to be reassuring, to legitimate a writer as a creature of obsession and habit. Anne Michaels’ third and most recent novel, Held, is not about the Holocaust, as her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was, but in its themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, we see her Read more ...
Leila Greening
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are richly luminescent, never cold or monochromatic.However, criticism of this opulence, a style described by Carol Rumens as "sea-lit", disintegrates when the radiance of lines like "the cherry-magnified boy who felt keenly fractures in / his bones clicking like wings" appear. Hutchinson marries words emphatically, with a constant attention to music. His Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Over 10 years in the making, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews reflects its namesake in more ways than one.To those familiar, it is paean and tribute to one of the most famous literary hangouts in the world; to those unfamiliar it, is an introduction and invitation to this hallowed space: an English-speaking bookshop found in the heart of Paris which has, in its current location since 1951, acted as a meeting-place for a range of writers and artists (both major and minor).The book itself is a collection of conversations between these figures and literary director Adam Biles, who Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew a discreet veil over his later private life. But the central section of the new book is little more than a catalogue of Cornwell’s many, many affairs, which is repetitive, a bit tawdry, and hard to find the will to plough through. I would probably have been happy to have confirmed that he actually was the shit he was always rumoured to be, without having to wade through all the gruesome details.Not Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young Mauritian girl who lives in the novel’s titular village slum and is forced to give up school in order to work for the wealthy De Grandbourg family, Riambel focuses on the "other" side of Mauritius, the one not depicted on tourist postcards.Intertwined with Noemi’s poignant and beautifully recounted life story are those of other women, former enslaved mothers, daughters, sisters and girls. From beyond the Read more ...
India Lewis
The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an absorbing examination of how one fleeting moment from childhood can have lasting and unpredictable consequences, and how a life might be irrevocably defined by such contingencies.Originally published in 1996, this translation by Tanya Leslie is a sensitive treatment of the Ernaux’s words, bearing across her typically confessional – and much lauded – style. It is also a timely translation, riding the wave of Ernaux-interest following her Nobel Prize win in 2022.Shame opens with the pivotal Read more ...
CP Hunter
Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as crime fiction, or else labeled as a kind of suburban horror.Her astonishing skill, however, lay in the balance between genres: she wrote persistently along that tightrope of mundane normalcy and unsettling surreality, and deftly wove stories that leave the reader feeling uncomfortably disturbed – and yet unable to articulate precisely why. In her novels, people are rarely who they present themselves to be; intentions are obscured or hard-to-read; the narrative Read more ...
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: searing is a regular participant, as is honest, and urgent, and unflinching. All of these words share a common indistinctness; each appeals to timeliness and/or some kind of apparent bravery; and each actually means extremely little.But without a doubt the lord of vague and laudatory adjectives is powerful. Publishers and publicists like to say that this or that is ‘a vital and powerful comment on/response Read more ...
India Lewis
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based on a factual trial and a real, forgotten Victorian author. While the premise is interesting and the story is engaging in itself, this book perhaps doesn’t quite feel as readable as her past novels – though, admittedly, that is a high bar.The Fraud centres around Eliza Touchet, the cousin of real-life author William Ainsworth, who in his time outsold Charles Dickens. Eliza is a good conduit for the narrative: a woman who has an affair with both Ainsworth and his wife and who, in later years, Read more ...
Alice Brewer
Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins paratactically, with a list of displacements:MS REAL FEELS POSITIONLESS At her desk in the studio (not as often as she would like) or at the kitchen table or sofa, or at a kitchen table or at some else’s desk or in the pub or in Pollokshields Library (most often). Where she is situated, there you will find Ms Real staring, scrolling distracted, turning her phone over like a peach in her palm sliding it behind her laptop to avoid further frustration. Peach 15 minutes 5 minute break another 15 Read more ...