Manual for a Decent Life is Kavita Jindal’s debut novel and winner of the 2018 Brighthorse Prize. Jindal is a founder member of the Asian women’s writing collective, The Full Kahani (in English, The Whole Story), which produced May We Borrow Your Country?, a collection of poetry and short stories, published in 2019 by Linen Read More
Rarely do works of historical fiction immerse the reader in the protagonist’s thoughts so completely as in this last volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Written in the first person, from Cromwell’s point of view, Mantel’s narrative is so convincing that it is sometimes difficult not to take this for Thomas Cromwell’s actual memoirs. Read More
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, an inventive mining of the darker side of folk and fairy tales, was hailed in 2018 as one of 15 books by women ‘shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’ Her memoir, In the Dream House, offers Read More
In this latest collection of poems, David Morley, prize-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, puts his versatile lyrical toolkit on display. Sustaining his interest in the Romany gypsy community, its mythology and folklore—subjects of his previous Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Choice books, The Invisible Kings and The Gypsy and the Read More
We carry it around in our heads and visit the places where it once visited: Charlotte Square, gates locked to this greenest of glades since the last of the new turf was laid last year; now marked in time as the last time. I mark it idling at high railings reanimating stills of a once-tented Read More
‘I cannot live, just fucking let me die.’ Whether intentionally or not, James Womack’s translation, if we can call it that, of Maximian’s Elegies comes at a rather appropriate time. A global pandemic ravaging the world with seemingly no end in sight, ecological and societal collapse perhaps just a few decades around the corner, we Read More
I had never left home before. Aside from holidays, I hadn’t lived anywhere that wasn’t Dundee. Last summer, I did at the age of twenty-five what most people do at eighteen; I moved to Leeds, into student accommodation for my work placement. I was forced to make a home for myself in an unfamiliar place. Read More
The Air Year is Caroline Bird’s sixth collection with Carcanet. Her most recent and highly successful, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. Bird, who published her first collection at the age of 15, displays an astonishing talent and a unique ‘voice’, and is Read More
One may be surprised to discover that Shine, Darling is Ella Frears’ debut poetry collection. Frears presents an unapologetic front through her straightforward style, favouring lyric poetry as her medium. There is a raw intimacy to perform these experiences, whether it be a near-abduction, a suicide when she was in college, or having sex on Read More
Sitting outside in a motorway cafe on a cool August evening after the mizzling rain, Kirsty Gunn and I talked intensely (as we do) about a novel we had difficulties with. Many of our exchanges were underpinned by the question: how does form and genre enable writing to tackle its subject matter successfully? Will Harris’ Read More