Although Yejide Ajayi is a confident and educated woman with her own successful business, the society that she lives in recognises only her inability to conceive a child. “Women manufacture children,” her mother-in-law reminds Yejide, “and if you can’t you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman.” Shortlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s Read More
Hag-Seed : The Tempest Retold is part of the Hogarth series of re-workings of Shakespeare by “acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today” (p. 295), and of course there will be readers who cannot think why such a thing is necessary. But that is a nettle to be grasped another day. In Atwood’s story, actor-director Felix Read More
From the very start of Kate Clanchy’s The Not-Dead And The Saved (And Other Stories), we fall straight into her powerless mess of human nature responding to a power-hungry, often pessimistic world. Clanchy’s collection of short stories considers various forms of motherhood in respect to personal development. Through dimensional, flawed characters, and with notable proficiency, Read More
Deadlier than the Male, the tabloids said. They didn’t know the half of it. When reviewing Russel McLean’s previous novel Cry Uncle, I used the following sentence, “The gritty and honest narration has a truly Scottish attitude.” This is also true, perhaps even more so, of his newest book Ed’s Dead. McLean has already established Read More
Sandra Ireland’s debut novel Beneath the Skin haunts you from the moment you first turn the opening pages. Echoes of former traumas are deeply embedded in the lives of fully realised, broken characters and ring in the reader’s ears from the first moments. In a time of clichéd explosions in soda adverts, or brutal, overt Read More
“It is cruel to expect me to be both mother and daughter – such different expectations.” Joanna Walsh’s new book Vertigo (a collection of short stories would be an equally apt description) offers a series of glimpses into the life of her protagonist. She is a mother. A child. A wife. A lover. Walsh portrays Read More
If the purpose of a collection of short stories is to showcase the style and talent of the author, then The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim is an enormous success. All previously published in the New Yorker over the space of fifteen years, these stories offer a delicious coverage of the author’s Read More
One to hear One to remember And one to drink. The quietness of this little novel, The Noise of Time, is its weapon. Inside a jacket which shouts its title in blocky text and sings the author’s praises, a story is whispered covertly to the reader in snatches of non-linear narrative. This fictionalised biography of Read More
Imagine waking up one morning to find a bask of crocodiles and their very unapologetic owner have moved in next door! Half allegorical, half magical realism, Kate Hamer’s mesmerizing “Crocodile Hearts” will even have you examining your own place within a community. This idea of how an outsider can threaten a quiet suburban existence is Read More