October 14, 2021 Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka Review by Anna Hollingworth “Literary lion” is one descriptor attached to Wole Soyinka. For one, there’s a mane-like quality to his hair, a kind…
September 16, 2021 All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus Review by Anna Hollingsworth ”your 2am text / lit / like a dog panting / on her screen / hot rattling engine / pile…
September 9, 2021 Paradise by Kae Tempest Review by Anna Hollingsworth Remember, this man is not our friend, he is our weapon. OK? So, we treat him like we treat any…
August 24, 2021 The Promise by Damon Galgut Review by Anna Hollingsworth Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. The Good Doctor delved into a young doctor’s angry melancholy…
August 17, 2021 Clothes… and other things that matter by Alexandra Shulman Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth The last item of clothing that I bought was a pair of pink dungarees from M&S children’s department nearly two…
August 12, 2021 The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In The Bastard of Istanbul, a mysterious curse kills one family’s men before their time; 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in…
August 3, 2021 Three Rooms by Jo Hamya Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, the narrator discovers the communal kitchen in her Oxford house in a…
July 29, 2021 Heaven by Meiko Kawakami Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first encounter with Mieko Kawakami — as for most of us relying…
July 22, 2021 The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura Translated by Lucy North Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a particular skill to pulling off a character who is objectively reprehensible but nevertheless wins…
July 13, 2021 A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the…
July 1, 2021 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in The Vanishing Half, Kennedy, an overprivileged struggling actress, remembers a childhood shopping trip with her…
June 15, 2021 Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian MacDonald Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the short story The Last Obon, Satsuki is mistaken for the…
June 4, 2021 Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Why country X? Why language Y? Anyone who has lived abroad or taken up a foreign language will be familiar…
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 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…
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 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…
February 23, 2021 Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo by Sam Mills Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Remember the 1990s? It was a decade where lads’ mags decorated magazine shelves in supermarkets and where Men Are from…
February 18, 2021 How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth When an author is described as having a ”fresh voice”, I usually dismiss the description with a shrug; the attribute…
February 11, 2021 The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Robert Jones, Jr. had doubts about writing The Prophets: “Not only was the subject matter too uncharted but the psychic…
December 8, 2020 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth One way for a book to land a blow is to describe dark, brutal matters but to dress them…
November 24, 2020 Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine a mining town and everything covered in shades of coal, from the people to the buildings to the sky…
November 10, 2020 Earthlings by Sayaka Murata Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth How do you feel about the prospect of someone having sex with their grandfather? And…
October 22, 2020 The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante Translated by Anne Goldstein Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Adolescence can be brutal, and in The Lying Life of Adults Elena Ferrante brings it out…
October 8, 2020 The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida by Clarissa Goenawan Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In one of the marketing quotes on its cover, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is described as “an elegantly…
