Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
The cruise of a lifetime: Proleterka, by Fleur Jaeggy, reviewed
Near the start of Fleur Jaeggy’s extraordinary novel Proleterka, the unnamed narrator reflects: ‘Children lose interest in their parents when…
Kristen Roupenian’s debut short stories fulfil all expectations
Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went…
Caught between fascism and witchcraft: All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed
All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the…
Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…
Love and loneliness prevail in the latest short stories
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction,…
Françoise Frankel: a spirited woman on the run in Occupied France
Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in…
A choice of first novels
Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
Books aren’t medicine. They’re more powerful than that
Who can forget the terrible climax of Howards End, when Leonard Bast is killed by a deluge of books? Death…
Hot Milk’s heroine has snaky curls and a basilisk stare
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
A bookseller’s guide to book thieves
Notoriously, during the riots in London five years ago, Waterstones was the only high-street shop that wasn’t looted. But that…
Meet the librarians – and book borrowers – of the Calais Jungle
Sikander and I are sitting at a small table in a small shed. The shed is filled floor-to-ceiling with books:…
Jonathan Galassi’s fictional poet made me doubt my knowledge of American literature
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
The dark side of Delhi
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
Melissa Kite comes out fighting. Again
Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing…
The unexpected joys of working while pregnant
‘You are like my cat.’ So I was told when eight-and-a-half months pregnant, just before going on maternity leave from…
L.P. Hartley’s guide to coping with a heatwave
Those of us who have been struggling to endure the recent heat should turn to L.P. Hartley’s classic coming-of-age novel The…
Great literary tea parties (oh, and ours)
Every summer this magazine invites some of its (randomly selected) subscribers to tea in the garden. Every Englishman loves tea…
Book clubs
Everyone knows somebody who belongs to a book club. From informal gatherings of bookish friends in living rooms and cafés…
First novels: When romance develops from an old photograph
The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and…
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Lose weight the Muriel Spark way
Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from…
What a tortoise can teach us
‘Are you a dog or a cat person?’ It’s one of those questions that comes up eventually — in conversation,…
Shire, by Ali Smith - review
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
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