There is only one road, and there is no choice but to take it; to ride atop that stolen wagon straight down over the guilt and dirt and prejudice of an old town, and to stumble, hands and knees to the ground along Laird Hunt’s gravel road all the way to that 1930 Indianapolis lynching. Read More
“You don’t think things like this happen in woodsy Maine, off the beaten path? It sounds more like L.A.? In Maine, there may be a path, but it’s never clear […]” In The State We’re In: Maine Stories, we are transported to Maine – the coastal state that writer Ann Beattie recognises has the reputation Read More
Sonja, the protagonist in Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, is a Danish translator who is working on a series of Swedish crime fiction novels. She is “over forty” and appears to have reached a midlife crisis when the novel begins. She decides to learn to drive, despite suffering from a form of inherited positional vertigo which can Read More
Tom Hubbard was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works, including several novels and poetry collections. Slavonic Dances, the name given to a series of orchestral pieces by Dvorak, is a happy title for this sequence of novellas whose characters Read More
Cross Purpose is an energetic debut novel that attempts to perform a balancing act between a gritty Tartan Noir and a darkly comic detective novel. Claire MacLeary’s first novel jumps into Scottish crime fiction with both feet. She doesn’t flinch away from the torrid tedium of life in Scottish council estates, but embraces the dichotomy Read More
Alexander McCall Smith is a prolific author of fiction and academic texts, and he is best known as the writer of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. His latest release, A Distant View of Everything, is the eleventh in a series of novels known as the “Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries”. Like the Jessica Fletcher character Read More
That is the thing about films. They don’t change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to Read More
In this entry for the Man Booker International, acclaimed Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen offers an intimate novel which showcases the moving and evocative powers of literature. The Unseen is a book which on the surface, through its accessible and uncomplicated language, seems simple and plain: the lives of a single family living and sustaining themselves Read More
“They’re like worms. What kind of worms? Like worms, all over.” Two voices present themselves: one in question, one in answer; a child and a mother, yet sharing no relation. The subject of conversation is unclear, the situation likewise. We know only a sense of unease. As the dialogue unfolds, the child, David, guides the Read More