Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Review by Max Dunbar Welcome, Stranger I was born in the early eighties. My childhood was coloured by reflective screens of jumping pixels. I became fascinated by video games. There…
Review by Max Dunbar Welcome, Stranger I was born in the early eighties. My childhood was coloured by reflective screens of jumping pixels. I became fascinated by video games. There…
Review by Lory Widmer Hess In the expansive days of summer, what better book could there be to read than a classic of travel literature, Mark Twain’s career-making account of…
Review by Terence Jagger T S Eliot, when I read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, was my introduction to modernism as a reluctant and noisily sceptical schoolboy, and…
Reviewed by Harriet First published in 1927, nearly a hundred years ago, in the satirical British magazine Punch, the letters of fictional girl-about-town Topsy to her best friend Trix actually…
Translated by Jesse Kirkwood Review by Karen Langley Summer reading tastes vary, but for me there’s nothing better than settling down with a satisfying mystery novel, particularly of the Golden…
Review by Susan Osborne Opening with a beginning and an end, The Queen of Dirt Island follows four generations of women in one unconventional household, all devoted to each other…
Translated by Oonagh Stransky Review by Rob Spence The British are not receptive to literature in translation. Sure, any decent bookshop will have a smattering of foreign classics – Proust,…
Reviewed by Harriet There’s probably a name for a sub-genre of books that echo or allude to earlier works of literature, something that has to be well done to make…
Review by Susan Osborne Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is the story of an obsessive friendship between two young girls in 1950s rural France, one of whom will briefly…
Review by Annabel Having very much enjoyed Annie Macmanus’ debut novel Mother Mother last year, I was really keen to read her next. The Mess We’re In is as similar…
Review by Liz Dexter This book is written for anyone who is wondering why, in spite of decades of effort to promote change, the numbers of women pursuing careers in…
Review by Julie Barham Ian McEwan’s output is made up of a great variety of types of novels, going from the specific to the general, and sometimes back again. He…
Review by Susan Osborne I’ve read all Kamila Shamsie’s novels and, despite enjoying each of them, Burnt Shadows remained my favourite, but with its exploration of ‘80s Pakistan and contemporary…
Review by Susan Osborne Miriam Toews’ Fight Night takes the form of a letter written by nine-year-old Swiv to her father who her grandmother has told her is off fighting…
Review by Julie Barham I often seek out what can be called “cosy crime” or at least crime novels that are not too brutal or police procedural. Richard Coles is…
Review by Liz Dexter In stressing users of the First Folio, then, this book is not concerned with the discussions of how the Folio came to be published, the provenance…
Review by Liz Dexter The history of women’s words, it turns out, is full of surprises, of things which aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Even our basics have unfamiliar beginnings….
By Anne Goodwin How has the Covid pandemic affected your reading? Have you lapped up lockdown literature or have you avoided it – cliché alert – like the plague? For…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s been a while since we reviewed a British Library Crime Classic on here, so it’s a pleasure to write about this recent one, the only novel…
Review by Annabel I discovered Leila Aboulela with her previous novel Bird Summons, in which three Muslim women living in Edinburgh go on a road trip and spiritual quest to…
Reviewed by Harriet One of the problems with bounding spontaneously through life, I’ve discovered, is that people do tend to react to me quite strongly. I’d like to say that…
Review by Max Dunbar The Savannah of George Dawes Green‘s mystery novel is full of tourists. Not regular tourists. These tourists ride around in the back of a hearse. In…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster With five absorbing novels published in eight years, Claire Fuller has rapidly become one of the essential voices in contemporary literary fiction. Her accolades include a…
Reviewed by Gill Davies I was intrigued by the title of this book, which didn’t announce itself as a traditional industrial history, and by its format – it looks rather…