The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill
Reviewed by Victoria Best I firmly believe you can never dismiss any genre of book or any particular fictional setting as not your cup of tea, because written the right…
An Interview with Heather O’Neill
Interview by Victoria Best I was fortunate enough to catch up with Canadian Heather O’Neill, author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, over a skype IM call when she was…
The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski
Reviewed by Max Dunbar I first read House of Leaves as a teenager and fell in love with it: a grunge-emocore memory palace of a novel, about a suburban home, that gets…
Philipp Meyer and Linda Spalding talk to Kirsty Wark at Hay
By Linda Spalding The Hay Festival is mythic to Canadians. What I mean is that we all covet an invitation. Mine came by email a few months before the event…
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Reviewed by Harriet Devine. “The world is ending,” she said. “The message has come from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years…
A Short Interview with Bethan Roberts
Interview by Annabel Shiny’s Fiction Editor Annabel catches up with Bethan Roberts, author of Mother Island reviewed here. Annabel: Baby-snatching, child abduction, particularly when a child is too young to fend for…
Mother Island by Bethan Roberts
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Bethan Roberts’s fourth novel takes on one of the primal fears of all parents – that of someone abducting your child. Mother Island is not, however,…
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
Reviewed by Harriet Devine She was her father’s daughter. It was said of her from the beginning. For one thing, Alma Whittaker looked precisely like Henry: ginger of hair, florid…
Reading Cornwall
Written by Jane Carter It’s holiday reading time, so we asked a Cornish blogger to look at some of her favourite books set in Cornwall – and it also felt…
Spotlight on Publishers: Peirene Press
Written by Meike Ziervogel Glittering Gems in the Sea of the Human Imagination “I read, therefore I write, therefore I publish.” Before I started up as a publisher, I was…
On Sisters of Treason by Elizabeth Fremantle
I have always been fascinated in the forgotten lives of women in history and Sisters of Treason (the second in my Tudor trilogy) exposes the lives of three such women. The novel…
The Unknown Bridesmaid by Margaret Forster
Reviewed by Victoria Best Margaret Forster is one of those authors who have been steadily producing first class fiction for decades without ever getting much in the way of recognition…
Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst by Vita Sackville-West & Sarah Raven
Reviewed by Rachel Fenn Sissinghurst is the sort of place that you can’t help but fall in love with at first sight, even if you have absolutely no interest in…
The Gospel of Loki by Joanne M. Harris
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell I knew that Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, had other literary strings to her bow, for a few years ago she published two volumes of fantasy for…
On Translating Boel Westin’s Biography of Tove Jansson – by translator Silvester Mazzarella
I am ashamed to admit that I lived in Helsinki (in Swedish Helsingfors), for more than twenty years during Tove Jansson’s lifetime without ever meeting her or learning very much…
The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw
In early 2011 I realised the bookshop I’d been running for the last two years would probably have to close. It operated from a converted narrowboat permanently moored in a…
Black Lake by Johanna Lane
Reviewed by Danielle Simpson Johanna Lane’s debut novel, Black Lake, is the sort of story that creeps up on you. You don’t realize just how good it is until halfway through…
Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin
Translated by Silvester Mazzarella Reviewed by Simon Thomas Tove Jansson is one of my very favourite authors, and I often recommend her to friends and fellow bibliophiles. Each time, except…
The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Mom liked to celebrate the little things. Like finding a forgotten wrinkled dollar in a lint-ridden coat pocket, or when there was no line in the…
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
Reviewed by Victoria Best Best book of the year so far is Stephen Grosz’s compilation of case stories from his thirty years as a psychotherapist, The Examined Life; How We Lose…
The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone
Reviewed by Harriet Devine At the beginning of the The Dead Beat, Martha Fluke is visiting her father’s grave in an Edinburgh cemetery. There was a bunch of yellow carnations at…
Celia Fremlin – A Life of Crime
By Victoria Best Celia Fremlin published her first crime fiction, The Hours Before Dawn, in 1959, when she was 44 years old, and it was an instant success, winning her the Edgar…
Tristano: A Novel by Nanni Balestrini
Translated by Mike Harakis Reviewed by Helen Parry The philosophy that a text is created by the reader as well as the writer is well known and widely shared these…
The Telling Error by Sophie Hannah
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Well, Sophie Hannah has done it again. Did anyone ever have such a fiendishly fertile and convoluted imagination? This is her ninth crime novel, and she…