Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner
Review by Max Dunbar How the Other Half Lie There is a fabulous new genre in commercial fiction. I call it ‘Posh People Getting In Trouble’. The best at this…
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Review by Peter Reason Elizabeth Kolbert is a celebrated American journalist, staff writer for the New Yorker. Her work focuses unflinchingly on the ecological challenges of our time, as can…
Mr Fortune’s Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Reviewed by Harriet It can only be good news that Penguin have been reissuing Sylvia Townsend Warner’s admirable novels. I only discovered her writing about three years ago when I…
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, several of which are available in…
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 a cross-dressing lesbian; a communist from…
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 talk about excrement, particularly in detail,…
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 has now turned his attention to…
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 in San Francisco. On weekday afternoons,…
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 (1936-39). Jimmy Jump (1916-1990) was a…
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 book opens eerily similarly to Sathnam…
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 then film A Clockwork Orange. Often…
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 no mistake. Helpless to protest as…
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 the individual essays is universally high…
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 poets as well as collections of…
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 history, mixing in a good dose…
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 with the fairies in the wood…
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 who we are or who we…
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, the third novel of his Harlem…
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 published widely on his work. This…
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 at this point. New in paperback,…
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. She seems to be scandalously obscure…
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 life in a huge munitions factory…
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…
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 his two lead actors to promote…