Annie Zaidi is a writer, journalist, prize-winning playwright and essayist whose novel, A Prelude to a Riot was shortlisted in 2019 for the JCB prize for Indian literature. The book centres around three generations of two landowning families, one Hindu and one Muslim, in an unnamed town in Southern India. Other characters include Garuda, a Read More
Pedophobia – the excessive fear of children – is a staple within the horror genre, unsettling and interrogating our primal instinct towards nurturing the young. There’s the sadistic son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, the adolescent cult in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, or the tribal warfare of stranded schoolboys Read More
In Angie Cruz’s third novel, shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, a young country girl is trapped by circumstance in a patriarchal society on the brink of civil war. Forced into marriage with a violent, alcoholic man twice her age, fifteen-year-old protagonist Ana Canción carries the burden of her family’s future on her young Read More
Manual for a Decent Life is Kavita Jindal’s debut novel and winner of the 2018 Brighthorse Prize. Jindal is a founder member of the Asian women’s writing collective, The Full Kahani (in English, The Whole Story), which produced May We Borrow Your Country?, a collection of poetry and short stories, published in 2019 by Linen Read More
Rarely do works of historical fiction immerse the reader in the protagonist’s thoughts so completely as in this last volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Written in the first person, from Cromwell’s point of view, Mantel’s narrative is so convincing that it is sometimes difficult not to take this for Thomas Cromwell’s actual memoirs. Read More
Critically acclaimed as ‘the queen of Scottish folklore-inspired domestic noir’, Sandra Ireland’s oeuvre boasts three successful thrillers that all open with haunting epitaphs and disturbing prologues. However, Ireland’s new novel, Sight Unseen, is lighter. Narrated in alternating chapters, Sarah Sutherland in first person and her elderly father, John, in third person, we are immersed in Read More
Meaghan Delahunt, a small sunburst of a person, meets me on a cold mid-March morning in Edinburgh with a smile and a joke about elbow-bumping, softly deflecting the viral threat of a handshake or hug as only an avid reader of that day’s online news would know to do. On the train and in the Read More
The sober aubergine cover of the latest issue of Gutter is distinct from the magazine’s customary vibrant jackets. In collaboration with guest editors Alycia Pirmohamed and Jay G Ying, Gutter makes a stand against tokenisation in this celebration of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic writers from Scotland and across the world. Exploring the multi-faceted aspects Read More
Luke Brown’s latest novel Theft begins with a tension that won’t let up. Paul’s mother has just died. His sister has gone missing. He’s done something terrible. And it’s also the run-up to the EU referendum. We are hurtling headlong towards some awful reveal. Knowing the Brexit result offers little reassurance. Except this novel is Read More