October 28, 2021 The Drowned City by K.J. Maitland Review by Julie Barham A world turned upside down is the subject of this vivid historical novel set in an English city: politically a…
October 26, 2021 Raising Laughter: How the Sitcom Kept Britain Smiling in the ‘70s by Robert Sellers Review by Annabel I watched an awful lot of telly in the 1970s, my formative teenage years. It was thus inevitable that between the…
October 26, 2021 Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia by Jeevan Vasagar Review by Liz Dexter Open to global flows of capital but largely closed to political change, Singapore is a reform-minded dictator’s dream, suggesting that…
October 21, 2021 The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles Review by Annabel Amor Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, was published in 2011 when he was in his mid-forties. It was such a…
October 21, 2021 Trust, by Domenico Starnone Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davis My initial recommendation for any readers of this novel would be to turn to Jhumpa Lahiri’s…
October 19, 2021 Light Rains Sometimes Fall: A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian Review by Liz Dexter “For Japan’s lotus blossom, praying mantis and bear, we have bramble, wood louse and urban fox” Lev Parikian, a writer,…
October 19, 2021 April in Spain by John Banville Reviewed by Harriet Almost exactly a year ago, I reviewed John Banville’s Snow [here], an immensely enjoyable country house murder mystery. I particularly liked…
October 14, 2021 Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead Reviewed by Harriet ‘Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked’. So we are introduced to the leading character in Colson…
October 14, 2021 Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka Review by Anna Hollingworth “Literary lion” is one descriptor attached to Wole Soyinka. For one, there’s a mane-like quality to his hair, a kind…
October 12, 2021 Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer Reviewed by Rebecca Foster In February, the inaugural Barbellion Prize was awarded to Golem Girl, visual artist Riva Lehrer’s account of growing up with…
October 12, 2021 Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore Review by Basil Ransome Davies In Young Stalin the author studied his subject’s early career under the microscope. In this epic volume he expands…
October 7, 2021 The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir Translated by Lauren Elkin Review by Karen Langley Simone de Beauvoir is probably best recognised nowadays for her ground-breaking feminist work The Second Sex,…
October 7, 2021 Five fascinating facts about fictional asylums By Anne Goodwin In my professional life as a clinical psychologist, I visited around a dozen of the hundred or so long-stay psychiatric hospitals…
October 5, 2021 The Story of the Country House by Clive Aslet Reviewed by Harriet My definition of the country house is this: a work of domestic architecture in a rural location, surrounded by its own…
October 5, 2021 The Right Sort of Girl by Anita Rani Review by Liz Dexter How on earth did I get to where I am today? This is no overnight success story, this is not…
