April 13, 2021 Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess Schizophrenic. The very word is a trigger for aversion, a signal to run away, with its spiky, spluttered consonants and…
April 13, 2021 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…
April 8, 2021 Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare Reviewed by Peter Reason It was on a family skiing holiday that Horatio Clare finally went mad. This was the culmination of a period…
April 8, 2021 A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Age of Acceleration In 2019, the Unherd website carried an article by Gerard DeGroot, about the Chang’e 4 moon landing….
April 6, 2021 Where Stands a Wingèd Sentry by Margaret Kennedy Reviewed by Harriet If you’ve heard of, or read, Margaret Kennedy at all, it’s likely to be her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph. Written…
April 6, 2021 Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce Reviewed by Heavenali Miss Benson’s Beetle is Rachel Joyce’s latest novel – now published in paperback. Women are at the heart of this wonderful…
April 1, 2021 Hyphens & Hashtags* by Claire Cock-Starkey Reviewed by Liz Dexter Subtitled “The stories behind the symbols on our keyboards” (the subtitle linked to the main title via an asterisk rather…
April 1, 2021 The Stone Age by Jen Hadfield Reviewed by Hayley Anderton It’s seven years since Jen Hadfield’s last collection, Byssus, came out. This was the point when I really became aware…
March 30, 2021 The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji Translated by Ho-Ling Wong Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a very unusual book, and I initially disliked its artificiality – extreme, even by…
March 30, 2021 The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Translated by Philip Boehm Reviewed by Gill Davies This is an important republication of a novel which first appeared eighty years ago under a…
March 25, 2021 Notes From Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books…
March 25, 2021 The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers Reviewed by Annabel With The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers brings her Wayfarers series to a close. The quartet began in 2015…
March 23, 2021 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…
March 23, 2021 Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-1938, edited by Simon Heffer Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was a little girl I kept a diary. It was pink and fluffy with a lock and a…
March 18, 2021 Bestiary by K-Ming Chang Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth “At a loss for words”, “in awe” and “confused but thrilled” are all phrases that I could use to describe…
March 18, 2021 Keats by Lucasta Miller Reviewed by Harriet It may not have escaped your attention that 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats. Yes, on…
March 16, 2021 Cathedral by Ben Hopkins Reviewed by Terence Jagger The cathedral, and the difficulties building it, both physical, financial, and aesthetic, dominate the early parts of the book, and…
March 16, 2021 Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies Joan Didion knows that language is not a windowpane. Clarity, yes; transparency, no. To report a fact requires arranging words….
March 11, 2021 Tang: A Shetland Story by J.J. Haldane Burgess Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Northus is a new project from Michael Walmer (who’s own reprint series will be familiar to many readers here) and…
March 11, 2021 The Disciple by Michael Mallon Reviewed by Annabel A novel about the increasingly toxic relationship between an old art historian and his young acolyte set in Florence was always…
March 9, 2021 Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend by Mark Glancy Review by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a scene in Charade, a 1964 film which Cary Grant made with Audrey Hepburn, in which the following…
March 9, 2021 Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez Translated by Christina MacSweeney Reviewed by Pete Freeth Havana Year Zero is a delightfully unusual detective story from Karla Suárez and translated into English…
March 5, 2021 Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of…
March 4, 2021 The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell Reviewed by Harriet ‘Every millennial woman should have this on her bookshelf’ says Pandora Sykes on the front of Nell Frizzell’s new book. New…
March 4, 2021 She Come By It Natural by Sarah Smarsh Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Forty years ago I spent some time on the motel strip at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to do some hiking…
