Given the massively popular and critical success of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, it was inevitable perhaps that The Heart Broke In did not win the Costa Award; however, it was a worthy contender, sharing the range of the great and very ambitious Russian family sagas of the 19th and 20th centuries. James Meek Read More
The Havocs is Jacob Polley’s third published collection of poetry. This ensemble of poems displays an eclectic mix of styles and draws inspiration from sources as diverse as Anglo-Saxon poetry and the work of Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin. The collection is unified by the poet’s insightful reflections on universal human concerns such as love, Read More
Havisham, is a book based on the life of Great Expectations’ Miss Catherine Havisham, the mad woman who, after being left at the altar, takes in the orphan Estella and teaches her to break the hearts of men. The book both shows the descent into madness of Dickens’s infamous character, but also explains how she Read More
Empathy and Rage is a comprehensive and informative collection of essays from twelve contributors on literary representations of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), or Female circumcision, in African and Diaspora literature, film and other media. The book also provides an insight into the actualities of the practice itself, its geographical location and the history of the Read More
A peculiar feature of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, is that certain characters, including Emperor Lucius, are killed twice. Simon Armitage professes mystification at this. There needn’t be. The poem (c. 1400) is to a large extent combat porn. Like all species of porn, sexual or otherwise, it craves and provides sensation, narrative plausibility coming a Read More
The Dark Film, the fourth collection from the multi-award winning Paul Farley, delves yet deeper into the poet’s fascination with the visual, and explores further a wide array of familiar topics – memory, history, technology, national identity, landscapes. While the mood throughout the book clunks uneasily between the trivial and the serious, the verse nevertheless Read More
If love and loss are perhaps the most commonplace of human experiences, they are also amongst the most difficult to write well about. How is one to commemorate the shared intimacy of a relationship unique to lovers, “themselves absolutely, beyond imitation”, to craft fine phrases when so swallowed up in sorrow that “no one can Read More
Clearly, there is something about poets and bees. Observe them in Paradise Lost, hear them in Keats, and love them with Plath. The Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy published a whole collection dedicated to them. What is it, then, about bees? Is it their exquisite industry, that sonorous voice, their structured life and space, or Read More
Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize in 2010, Zoe Venditozzi’s Anywhere’s Better Than Here lives up to the expectations created by such a nomination. The novel tells the story of Laurie, a woman who is fed up with her life, particularly her gaming-addicted boyfriend and her tedious job, and depicts the adventure she is Read More