William Wall’s new collection, Ghost Estate, takes its title from lonely places: the large, half-finished ‘ghost estate’ housing schemes of Ireland. First started during the height of the Celtic Tiger Boom, the economic collapse left them as unfinished and largely uninhabited chilling and empty spaces. Wall mirrors these qualities here. His sentences are carefully minimalist; Read More
With violence, romance, awkwardness and black humour aplenty, Ben Wheatley’s latest film appears almost elegiac in its portrayal of a Britain now overrun with upper-middle class snobbery, desperately depressing heritage locations and wearers of sensible shoes. The movie is essentially a road movie but one which takes an agonising turn for the worse even before Read More
Cop-thrillers have become a bit of a dead horse. Buddy cops in which one is a straight-laced stickler for protocol and the other an unpredictable loose cannon? Four shoot-outs happening before their lunchtime? Walking away from explosions without blinking? And all this while saving and/or seducing a few gorgeous (and/or naked) fashion models? They have Read More
The title of Tom Wright’s debut novel What Dies in Summer suggests that it is a bog-standard contemporary crime thriller. It is a long-standing cliché, for instance, for crime novels to use the word “death” or one of its derivatives in their titles. With its depiction of a young female with her back to the Read More
Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was a critical success, hailed as “haunting and brilliantly original”, with a character that is “impossible to forget”. It claimed the Somerset Maughum award in 1996; since then, Warner has won many prizes including the Saltire Book of the Year award (twice). He was also long-listed for the Man Booker Read More
I first came across Petrucci’s work after meeting his co-founder of Perdika Press, Peter Brennan, who recommended Petrucci’s poetry to me. Petrucci is a notable polymath, having trained in physics and environmental science, though more recently working in literary education and in a large number of poetry residencies. The i tulips sequence, of which this volume Read More
In “Tamagotchi”, one of the short stories in Adam Marek’s second collection, The Stone Thrower, the narrator wonders “what kind of demented mind would create a child’s toy” that was capable of catching AIDS. Reading through whole collection, it is at times difficult not to wonder about the state of mind of the author himself. Read More
“I ran into an industrial estate and looked around, / the spikes got me.” Having self-published two pamphlets (softly softly catchy monkey and Sleeveless errand), and gained considerable performance experience both live and online, Emma Hammond offers her first full poetry collection, tunth-sk. The satisfyingly well-designed cover does not clarify the perplexing titular word (nor Read More
If I touched the Earth is Cynthia Rogerson’s fifth novel. The Canadian born author has lived in the UK for more than 30 years and boasts an impressive literary reputation as winner of the V.S. Pritchett Prize in 2008. Further boosting her popularity is the fact that, as a Scottish Book Trust Live Author, she Read More
Great Expectations focuses on the story of an orphan, Pip (Jeremy Irvine), who is thrust into the hectic and gritty world of Victorian London by an anonymous benefactor. I doubt I was the only person eager to see Irvine in Mike Newell’s adaptation following his powerful debut in War Horse last year. Before his world Read More