A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close is a brilliant work of fiction that has a multitude of layers and is set in various different timeframes from the early 1900s onwards. Based on true facts she has gathered, Close has written about an unconventional love triangle featuring two very unconventional women. These women, whom the Read More
To capture the effects of war on a person, humour the reader and shed doubt upon our country’s health system are all brave undertakings. Nonetheless, Victoria Hendry has taken the plunge and succeeded in achieving these aspects in her novel The Last Tour of Archie Forbes. Against the backdrop of the city of Edinburgh, described Read More
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance seems poetic, personal and political on the one page and then dismissive and cynical on the very next. The novel is the perfect microcosm of the nihilistic modern world, and when that dystopia is set in the historically romantic city of Paris, it turns into a symbol of tragedy. Read More
There are a lot of islands off the North-West coast of Europe, so it is easy to get lost among them, or even mislay one. In Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, John Lennon is trying to get back to his island in Clew Bay, in the very west of the West, but has forgotten which of them Read More
With her debut novel Jack in the Box, Hania Allen makes her pitch for a place in the highly competitive crime fiction genre. Set at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows DCI Yvonne ‘Von’ Valenti as she attempts to solve a murder which harks back to a number of unsolved cases from 1985 Read More
A debut work in the form of a collection of short stories is still a rarity; it would normally only be published well into a writer’s career, possibly after a number of novels. Of course the quality of the writing and the depth of talent of the writer can create an exception, and in Kseniya Read More
Travelling on the train to Glasgow, I dug around in my bag and found my copy of Douglas Lindsay’s The Legend of Barney Thomson. The cover brandishes the phrase “now a major motion picture”, so it must be a good read, right? A brand new book, I timidly opened the rigid cover, careful not to Read More
One Moonlit Night, Caradog Prichard’s only lyrical Welsh-language novel, has been re-released in this new edition. The novel is a haunting conjuring of the bleaker and more disturbing features of daily life in Bethesda, a small village in North Wales, during World War One. Retaining Philip Mitchell’s sympathetic 1995 English translation, it also includes two Read More
“A story unfolds. It doesn’t fall into your lap, all sorted. You miss the significant bits, or you might hoard and file details that just don’t seem to matter.” So says the idiosyncratic narrator of Ian Stephen’s wonderful novel, A Book of Death and Fish, and the author certainly follows this non-pattern of writing himself. Read More
Having been coaxed into seeing a horror film at a tender age, I’ve never since been able to gain enough distance from the gothic form to relish its thrills dispassionately. That half-glimpsed face in the darkened window or the unfamiliar shadow on the landing still results in one of those sudden irrational lurches of the Read More