My Italian Bulldozer is billed as a modern Commedia dell’arte and as such includes all of the expected players: The lovers, La Signora (the scheming female figure), Pierrot (the sad clown), Il Dottore (the mad professor), and the commoners. Main character Paul is a successful food and wine author who is struggling with the break-up Read More
J.M. Coetzee (Harville Secker, 2016); hbk, £17.99 Coetzee is canonical, curricular – you are unlikely to reach the end of an English degree without having read his Booker and Nobel prize winning novel Disgrace. Coetzee’s mature novels are dazzling, harrowing and beautifully written, in taut, elegant prose that never turns away from the sorrowful, traumatic Read More
Paul Beatty (Oneworld, 2016); pbk, £12.99 Paul Beatty’s latest work, Man-Booker Prize 2016 shortlister, The Sellout, is a novel about town planning. Not, perhaps, the stuff of what the New York Times has called “the most badass” American novel in years but, as Beatty’s vivid depictions of L.A. and Washington show, appearances can be deceiving. Read More
A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape, 2016); hbk. £17.99 Dundee-born A.L. Kennedy needs no introduction, being extensively published in fiction, no slouch in non-fiction, and a respected commentator in various media. She sidelines as an acerbic stand-up comedian; all these abilities and honed forms of observation feed Serious Sweet. At the time of reviewing, this book has Read More
Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband/Saraband, 2015); pbk, £8.99 His Bloody Project, is not only the title of this novel, (a work of fiction constructed to give the appearance of a factual account), it is also the title of a sensationalist chapbook referred to later in the novel, based on the memoir of our unreliable narrator and Read More
Kevin MacNeil (Polygon, 2016); pbk. £9.99 On a small Outer Herbridean island, the tiny community is obsessed with literature and plagued by social divisions. Everyone writes, the traditional greeting is “what are you working on?”, and once a year they host the Brilliant and Forever literary festival. The Brilliant & Forever is an unabashedly weird Read More
Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape, 2016); hbk: £14.99 Ottessa Moshfegh has won the Plimpton and Fence Modern Prizes for her shorter fiction, and her debut novel Eileen is now lined up for the Booker. One might ask what allows this author to dive in at the deep end of critical acclaim. If Eileen is anything to Read More
Magician, performer, mystic, and writer; there are many strings to Alan Moore’s bow. Touting a belief in the miraculous powers of art and language, the grizzled Northampton giant equates the role of the artist with that of the shaman: manipulating the consciousness of his audience with a knowledge of symbols, a grimoire of grammar. In Read More
A new and powerfully intriguing novel has just hit the literary market in the publication of the Nigerian novel, Taduno’s Song. “A novel about love,” it says on the back cover, “about sacrifice, about courage.” I was lucky to get a hold of it before its publication date and it certainly does have quite a lot to Read More
Under the Rose is a new collection of old short stories by Julia O’Faolain; the original publication dates range from her earliest collection in 1968 to a relatively recent collection in 2006. Plots, themes and structures vary greatly; some stories are taken from her childhood experiences, some from her adult relationships and some are entirely Read More