Imagine a world where the great land mass of the Pangea is still intact and human history has taken an entirely different route to the one we are familiar with. A world where geo-political circumstances have resulted in African nations developing into colonial powers and Europeans becoming a marginalised and dominated people. Noughts and Crosses by Read More
The Kailyard School is alive and well in contemporary Scottish fiction, but it has relocated to Botswana. Decidedly kicking against the hard-boiled masculine orthodoxies of recent Scottish crime fiction, Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series currently spans thirteen novels and has been adapted for a BBC/HBO television series by Richard Curtis and Anthony Read More
While all directors must hope that their debut feature will be a resounding success reminiscent of Orson Welles’sCitizen Kane (1941), this is rarely going to be the case. Many debuts will be low budget disappointments that nonetheless might show a glimmer of talent and potential. However, sometimes a debut film appears that has enough confidence and Read More
Paul Bush’s film Babeldom can easily be defined as an enigma. A terrifying “mockumentary”, the film leaves the viewer feeling uneasy and disoriented, yet manages to accompany this disquietude with a sense of awe at the spectacular juxtaposition of animation and handheld cityscape visuals. The film is narrated sporadically by two voices: an unnamed female archaeologist and Read More
Jasper Fforde (Hodder Paperbacks, 2001), pbk. £7.99. Any avid peruser of the fiction shelves of second-hand bookshops very quickly realises by the sheer frequency with which certain titles recur that these have the widest readership and the most enduring popularity. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is one such novel (the sequel, Lost in a Good Read More
Clare Best’s first collection, Excisions, opens with a sequence entitled ‘Matryoshka’ (“nested Russian dolls”) about the death of her parents, and feelings of grief and memory. Best’s poems, which have an intensity and physicality about them, include arresting descriptions of the body, as for example in “Stitch”, My grandmother knew about seams- her abdomen ruched Read More
Jamie McKendrick (Faber and Faber, 2012); pbk, 9.99. Out There is the sixth collection from poet and translator Jamie McKendrick. It opens with an epigraph sourced from Dante’s Paradiso: “This little patch of earth that makes us all so fierce.” That juxtaposition of earth and fierce humanity resonates thematically throughout McKendrick’s poems, which articulate the Read More
Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Cape, 2013); hdbk, £14.99. This graphic memoir and biography is the first collaborative project from Bryan and Mary Talbot. Bryan Talbot is an established comics creator whose previous works include Alice in Sunderland and the Grandville series. Mary Talbot is an academic writer whose research into language, gender and Read More
Emily Berry (Faber and Faber, 2013); pbk, £9.99. As a debut collection, Emily Berry’s Dear Boy intrigues, capturing the imagination with a sense of poetic experimentation. Yet Berry rarely forges any profound or emotional link with her readers, and seems strangely distant as a narrator. This is odd, as there is significant intimacy in her Read More