Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein
Reviewed by Victoria Best Cultural theorist Giorgio Agamben has some very interesting things to say on the topic of old age – the subject of Daniel Klein’s gentle, ruminative trundle…
Reviewed by Victoria Best Cultural theorist Giorgio Agamben has some very interesting things to say on the topic of old age – the subject of Daniel Klein’s gentle, ruminative trundle…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When my son was still a child, he used to be transfixed by The House of Tiny Tearaways, a BBC programme in which families experiencing some nightmare…
Reviewed by Victoria Best Readers of this delightful series are probably aware that the ITV adaptation will soon be on our screens, with James Norton playing the priest-turned-detective, Sidney Chambers…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When Jerry Seinfeld remarked that ‘There is no such thing as fun for all the family’, he could have had the Sackville-Wests in mind. In the…
Reviewed by Victoria Best I love novels about life on the stage, though they are a relatively rare genre. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes was one of the key books of my childhood,…
Reviewed by Victoria Best I do love a book with a really good jaw-dropping twist, and goodness me does The Headmaster’s Wife have one of those. But a device that’s great to…
Reviewed by Victoria Best It is November 1963 and Nell Benjamin is annoyed with her husband, Charlie. The previous evening, they had guests round, and the boorish drunk, Frank Tucker,…
Reviewed by Victoria Best Many years ago, when I was teaching literature at Cambridge University, my good friend Kathryn and I used to laugh together about a certain category of…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When this memoir begins, Joanna Rakoff is 23 and has just dropped out of her graduate literary program in London and returned to New York, declaring…
Reviewed by Victoria Best Several years ago, I read a short story collection by an author whose name was buzzing around the blogosphere as a talent to watch. The book…
By Victoria Best My Salinger Year was unquestionably one of the best books I’ve read this year – poignant, funny, real, warm – you can read my review here. The author, Joanna…
Reviewed by Victoria Best The best kind of non-fiction, I think, shows us how supposedly ‘average’ ordinary lives are really quite extraordinary. In the author’s foreward to his outstanding book…
Reviewed by Victoria Best John Cole is an antiquarian bookseller who has grown tired of his life and tired of his self. One long, hot summer, towards the end of…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When I was sitting my A levels back in 1987, my school thought itself very advanced because it gave us all a careers questionnaire to fill…
Review by Victoria Best At the funeral service of an aunt who has died unexpectedly, our narrator, Yolandi, notices a toddler creep up to the urn on the dias and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Compiled by Victoria Best As an accompaniment to Harriet’s review of Rumer Godden novels An Episode of Sparrows and The Dark Horse, here are five things you might not know about the perennially popular…
By Victoria Best Jill Dawson’s wonderful new novel, The Tell-Tale Heart, recounts the story of Patrick, a womanising lecturer who has recently received a heart transplant. By chance he discovers the identity…
Written by Victoria Best Gertrude Stein said rather pithily of Hemingway, ‘Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.’ In Naomi Wood’s brilliant account of all four of…
Questions by Shiny Editor, Victoria 1. What drew you towards Hemingway and his wives as a topic for fiction? I’ve always been interested in Hemingway as a writer, and a…