The best short story collections — from childish gabbling to jaded nihilism
Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter…
Ticks and crosses
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
The breast test
New mothers who can’t keep to the breast-feeding orthodoxy face needless misery and shame
Pop psychology
The secrets of bubble-wrap and other delicious little sensations
Some animals are more equal than others
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…
Privet sorrow
What does your front garden say about you?
The ass saw the angel
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…
Cold heart of the home
Against sterile modern kitchens
It takes a village (or six)
Can England’s 10,000 rural churches survive?
Lapsing into a comma
Modern manners and the fear of the full stop
Peeking into the seraglio
If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his…
A fair hearing
A beautiful speaking voice draws attention to the words spoken
Skulls and cross bones
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what…
Doubting Thomas
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
‘The joy just spilled out’
The vote on women bishops is a triumph for our diplomatic Archbishops
Seeeing the light
For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the…
More blood and mud
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the…
Escape through the locks
The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none…
Loved and lost
Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of…
