Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Review by Anna Hollingsworth War, identity, cultural outsiderness, exploitation, love, family and belonging (or more often not) were at the core of Ocean Vuong’s previous works, his debut poetry collection…
Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine all the life crawling in the undergrowth of a garden. In Garden Physic, Sylvia Legris digs it all up and exposes sediments of emotion, science…
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson
Review by Anna Hollingsworth On the cover of Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron, there is a butterfly trapped in a spider’s web. It’s a melancholy image, where beauty and death come together…
In the Margins by Elena Ferrante
Translated by Ann Goldstein Review by Anna Hollingsworth There’s something fascinating about writers writing about, well, writing and reading. I care more about writers’ preferred pens and books on their…
little scratch by Rebecca Watson
Review by Anna Hollingsworth When a novel comes with praise like ”daringly experimental” and “dazzlingly original”, my eyebrow tends to go up. Really? “Original” sounds better on the blurb than…
Longing and Other Stories by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
Translated by Anthony H Chambers and Paul McCarthy Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the UK, readers know their Murakamis and convenience store women. Jun’ichiro Tanizaki is much less known to…
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth We like to see history as going forward, progressing towards something better; it’s comforting to think that humankind is improving itself and societies grow fairer. It…
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine if a book began to narrate your story to you. What kind of voice would that be? Would it have the kind of softness suited…
Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria
Translated by Charlotte Whittle Review by Anna Hollingsworth When I pick up a book with a child narrator, it’s always with trepidation. I won’t name any culprits, but I’ve learned…
All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus
Review by Anna Hollingsworth ”your 2am text / lit / like a dog panting / on her screen / hot rattling engine / pile / of oily pity / sticky…
Paradise by Kae Tempest
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Remember, this man is not our friend, he is our weapon. OK? So, we treat him like we treat any other weapon. Clean him, store him,…
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. The Good Doctor delved into a young doctor’s angry melancholy in a remote rural hospital in…
Clothes… and other things that matter by Alexandra Shulman
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth The last item of clothing that I bought was a pair of pink dungarees from M&S children’s department nearly two years ago. So I must confess…
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In The Bastard of Istanbul, a mysterious curse kills one family’s men before their time; 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World tells the story…
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, the narrator discovers the communal kitchen in her Oxford house in a desperately filthy state, with surfaces covered…
Heaven by Meiko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first encounter with Mieko Kawakami — as for most of us relying on English translations — was her…
The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
Translated by Lucy North Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a particular skill to pulling off a character who is objectively reprehensible but nevertheless wins over the sympathies of the reader….
A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the last six months. For poetry, however,…
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in The Vanishing Half, Kennedy, an overprivileged struggling actress, remembers a childhood shopping trip with her mother: ”I love shopping,” she’d said,…
Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian MacDonald Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the short story The Last Obon, Satsuki is mistaken for the ghost of her aunt’s daughter by…
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Why country X? Why language Y? Anyone who has lived abroad or taken up a foreign language will be familiar with those questions. So, too, Polly…
The Immortals of Tehran by Ali Araghi
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Who hasn’t thought of poets as semi-mythical, Byron-like figures, with access to otherworldly visions? The truth is, most of the time poetry takes as much drafting…
King of Rabbits by Karla Neblett
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine a teenager who skips school, smokes, drinks and disappears from his girlfriend on a regular basis; a young man adrift whose main interests are vandalizing…
Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth After a year of daily Covid death reports, death really wasn’t something I wanted to hear any more of, let alone read a whole book about…