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 alone read a whole book about…
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 my feelings when I reached the…
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 Mars, Women Are from Venus with…
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 is repeated so often that it’s…
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 weight of it felt too heavy…
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 in a language that is the…
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 and every single surface. That’s the…
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 them justifying it by the fact…
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 in all its ugly passions, grievances…
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 cryptic, poetically plotted Murakami-esque whydunit.” Thematically…
Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth When Breasts and Eggs appeared in bookshops alongside all the Murakamis, Convenience Store Woman and Stranger Weather in Tokyo…
People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Ted Goossen Review by Anna Hollingsworth With Hiromi Kawakami, you don’t know what to expect other than that her writing will be wonderfully odd. Her gentle quirkiness and…
Rendang by Will Harris
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Will Harris has been described as one of the most important young poets in the UK, and his debut collection more than justifies that epithet. In…
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Review by Anna Hollingsworth The most exhilarating reviews to write are those where you can bring a book down, even if it’s just a tiny bit for an odd stylistic…
Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a point in Miss Austen where I felt that my sins had been found out. Cassandra, Jane Austen’s now elderly sister, tells a younger relation…
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Let’s face it: anything involving human tragedies, poverty, despair, abuse and crime offers a wealth of material for a novelist of any genre. At the risk…
Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
Review by Anna Hollingsworth My immediate reaction was a desperately deep sigh when, pre-launch, Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis was trumpeted as a must-read revelatory work on the fashion industry. Surely anyone…
Find Me by André Aciman
Review by Anna Hollingsworth There are two kinds of novels to which I don’t want to see a sequel. There are, of course, the literary nightmares that I pray I…
The Confession by Jessie Burton
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Capturing an era with impeccable accuracy is a challenge that anyone writing about the past must face; there will always be that critic who enjoys combing…
One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan
Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan Review by Anna Hollingsworth An author hardly tops any lists of most hazardous jobs, but looking at the whirlwind that Perumal Murugan has…
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Review by Anna Hollingsworth If Dr Frankenstein’s creation took the form of a book, Frankissstein is what I imagine it would look like. There’s a transgender doctor harvesting body parts for a…
The Quarter by Najib Mahfouz
Translated by Roger Allen Review by Anna Hollingsworth On the rare occasions that someone uncovers unpublished work by a deceased writer, publishing takes an archeological turn. An unpublished manuscript, like…
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first reaction was a desperately deep sigh when I heard that Ian McEwan would be taking on human-like artificial intelligence as the topic for his…
The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the run-up to its publication, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian was trumpeted as one of the most significant debuts of the year. There were promises of…