Award-winning novelist Dame Fiona Kidman published her tenth novel in New Zealand in 2016. All Day at the Movies took the New Zealand Heritage Prize for Fiction in 2016 and is now published in the UK in a new imprint for Gallic Books. Set in New Zealand, the novel begins in 1952, as war widow Read More
Part of the undoubted charm of the longstanding Pittenweem Arts Festival is discovering art in a huge variety of unexpected venues. In many cases the art is enhanced by its setting in what are normally domestic or commercial interiors. Add in the possibility of enjoying a lobster roll beside the harbour to sustain you between Read More
Two naked black men, one lifted up by a balloon, the other letting go of him. This stunning image on the front cover is intensified by a photograph of the poet on the back cover – Danez Smith, a black, gay, HIV-positive, queer slam poet from Minnesota. Don’t Call Us Dead has been shortlisted for Read More
Barker’s twelfth novel is a wonderfully unusual phantasmagoria of narrative and typography. It takes place in a future which has been rebuilt after the “Floods and the Fires and the Plagues and the Death Cults”; where ambition, ego, desire, death and poverty no longer exist. This calm, sustainable new world is inhabited by “The Young” Read More
Richard Scott’s first collection, Soho, is an uncompromising portrayal of life as a queer man, in a modern queer community. Intense and intimate, the collection is split into four parts, each focusing on a different aspect of Scott’s queer experience: violence, love, shame and community – though elements of each of these themes run through Read More
Assurances surely feels like the book J.O. Morgan was born to write, drawn as it is from his father’s work as an R.A.F officer maintaining the Airborne Nuclear Deterrent during the Cold War. Morgan’s poetry is widely recognised as being outstanding, original and this is his sixth book-length poem. What might seem a chilling subject Read More
Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born artist based in Mexico with a long-term interest in the current affairs of the Middle East. Knots’n Dust has been organized by the Beirut Art Centre and was on display in Lebanon in spring this year. Through animation, drawings, paintings and sculpture, Alÿs explores two themes ‒ the complexities of knots Read More
This must be one of the most shocking novels of 2017. In it, the author recounts the ordeal of a violent and abusive marriage. Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018, it has also been nominated as Book of the Year by Read More
Elif Batuman has had remarkable success with her debut novel, The Idiot. The American author, academic and journalist has long been a non-fiction writer for The New Yorker, but her turn to fiction has already garnered her critical acclaim – she was a Pulitzer prize finalist and made it onto the shortlist for the Women’s Read More
