Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I knew from the Costa Award-winning debut collection Flèche (2019) that Mary Jean Chan writes exquisite poems of love and longing. Their follow-up, Bright Fear, has…
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 Rebecca Foster When I first heard about journalist Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story, which was later shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, I…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month and so the perfect time to consider two memoirs of postnatal depression, one that was just published this month…
By Rebecca Foster Short novels can convey much truth in a low page count, ramping up the psychological intensity through pared-back scenes and a focus on one character or a…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Covid-19 chronicles. My favourites of the twenty-some I’ve read thus far have come from the…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Bristol friends and BBC colleagues Ben Macdonald and Nick Gates set out to chronicle a year in the life of a traditional Herefordshire orchard that has…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster In February, the inaugural Barbellion Prize was awarded to Golem Girl, visual artist Riva Lehrer’s account of growing up with spina bifida, entering Disabled culture, and…
By Rebecca Foster Two recent memoirs have shone a spotlight on the fauna and management strategies of the New Forest, a place my Hampshire-raised husband and I have often visited…
Paperback review by Rebecca Foster Curtis Sittenfeld’s sixth novel, a work of alternative history narrated entirely by Hillary Rodham and covering the years between 1970 and the recent past, is…
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,…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books like Time Song by Julia Blackburn,…
Paperback review by Rebecca Foster I almost passed on the chance to read this because I’d gotten the impression that it was nothing more than a romantic comedy with a…
By Rebecca Foster The Stubborn Light of Things collects five and a half years’ worth of Melissa Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The Times. The book falls into two…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Lottie (or Dr Charlotte Kristin Hart Levinson, to give her full name), the protagonist of 77-year-old New York City psychiatrist Arlene Heyman’s debut novel, is determined…
By Rebecca Foster Dearly by Margaret Atwood In her career of more than five decades, Margaret Atwood has produced work in an astounding range of genres: literary fiction, children’s books,…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Natasha Trethewey is an English professor and former U.S. Poet Laureate familiar to me from Native Guard (2006), her third of five poetry collections – an…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster The Wainwright Prize longlists for writing on UK nature and global conservation themes were announced in early June and will be whittled down to shortlists on…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When the Wainwright Prize longlists (for writing on UK nature and global conservation themes) were announced in early June, Dara McAnulty broke two records as the…
Review by Rebecca Foster From the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Circle, Dee tracks the spring as it travels north. From first glimpse to last gasp, moving between…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Evie Wyld’s third novel has the most stunning opening I’ve encountered in a long time. In under a page and a half, it describes a six-year-old…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to see Lucy Jones at Hungerford Town…
Translated by J. Ockenden Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Who could resist the title of this Italian bestseller? A black comedy about a hermit in the Italian Alps, it starts off…
