May 20, 2021 The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl Translated by Don Bartlett Reviewed by Annabel Kjell Ola Dahl is one of Norway’s foremost crime writers, especially known for his ‘Oslo detectives’ series,…
May 20, 2021 Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life by Frances Bingham Reviewed by Gill Davies This is a remarkable book about a remarkable woman. Valentine Ackland (1906-1969) was “transgressive” in so many ways. She was…
May 18, 2021 Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers Reviewed by Dan Lipscombe Sam Byers is a wonderfully talented author. His imagination and wordplay seemingly know no bounds. However, when you want to…
May 18, 2021 King Arthur’s Death by Michael Smith Reviewed by Rob Spence Last year, I reviewed Michael Smith’s excellent new version of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He…
May 13, 2021 The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000-2020, by Rachel Kushner Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Gallery of Souls I’ve Known Many years ago, novelist Rachel Kushner worked in a bar called the Blue Lamp…
May 13, 2021 The Fighter Fell in Love: A Spanish Civil War Memoir by James R. Jump Reviewed by Michael Eaude This is the memoir of a volunteer to the International Brigades, formed to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War…
May 11, 2021 Digging up Britain: A New History in Ten Extraordinary Discoveries by Mike Pitts Reviewed by Liz Dexter “Who are we? Where do we come from? What is Britain, and what does it mean to be British?” This…
May 11, 2021 Anthony Burgess, Collected Poems, edited by Jonathan Mann Reviewed by Rob Spence Inevitably, when Anthony Burgess is mentioned, people who have heard of him will associate him with the notorious novel and…
May 6, 2021 Featherweight by Mick Kitson Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess “A woman has to fight sometimes. It’s as well ya know how.” Annie Loveridge is a fighting woman, and…
May 6, 2021 In the Garden; Essays on Nature and Growing Review by Hayley Anderton This is the first of the Daunt Books essay collections that I’ve read and I’m mostly impressed. The quality of…
May 4, 2021 The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic…
May 4, 2021 Sistersong by Lucy Holland Reviewed by Annabel Lucy Holland’s impeccably researched novel combines the story of a 19th Century murder ballad, ‘The Two Sisters’ with Dark Ages post-Arthurian…
April 29, 2021 The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox Reviewed by Max Dunbar In Lords and Ladies, his Faerie novel, Terry Pratchett quotes an old folk rhyme: My mother said I never shouldPlay…
April 29, 2021 Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera Reviewed by Liz Dexter “If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out…
April 27, 2021 A Rage in Harlem and The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill,…
April 27, 2021 Whitman in Washington by Kenneth Price Reviewed by Rob Spence Kenneth Price is the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, and one of the leading experts on the poet, having…
April 27, 2021 A Theatre For Dreamers by Polly Samson Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Tired of lockdown, hankering to see new places, and in desperate need of some sun: that describes most of us…
April 22, 2021 A Virtual Image by Rosalind Brackenbury Reviewed by Helen Parry Until Michael Walmer reissued her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, I had never heard of Rosalind Brackenbury….
April 22, 2021 There’s No Story There – Wartime Writing, 1944-1945 by Inez Holden Reviewed by Hayley Anderton This is one of two recent releases from Handheld Press that cover aspects of wartime experience – in this case…
April 20, 2021 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…
April 20, 2021 Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden Reviewed by Annabel Diary of a Film follows a few days in the life of an auteur film director who is in Italy with…
April 20, 2021 Commemorative Modernisms by Alice Kelly Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the…
April 15, 2021 Circles and Squares: The Lives and Loves of the Hampstead Modernists by Caroline Maclean Review by Karen Langley The early part of the 20th century was a period when modern art was flourishing. New ways of living were…
April 15, 2021 Love Lives by Carol Dyhouse Reviewed by Harriet It’s probably a common experience among people who read a lot that sometimes two books will overlap in unexpected ways. This…
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…
