Twenty four years of marriage and two children might make everyday conversations mundane, unless the object of these discussions is somebody else’s life. Following an unnamed couple, Main documents their lives through short dialogues, each beginning with ‘Good day?’. It quickly becomes apparent that both parties are hiding more than they would be willing to Read More
Mark Haddon is best known for his 2003 bestseller, The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time. The Porpoise is his fifth novel for adults and it begins with a tragic accident; a light aircraft collides with a grain silo. Philippe, a wealthy businessman loses his pregnant wife in the crash, but his baby Read More
‘No earth move, no jolt, just empty whisper’. Not all fault lines cause violent eruptions. Often the plates do not collide but slowly shift, causing imperceptible change, yet over time, creating powerful new landscapes with small movements. Tracy Farr’s elegant and pensive novel, The Hope Fault, honours the force of the fault lines that run Read More
Carys Davies has been honing her short form craft for many years, with two collections of short stories to her name and a slew of impressive writing credits that include the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize. It should be no surprise then that her Read More
At its simplest, established writer Frank Woods’ debut novel Where the Bridge Lies is a melodramatic detective story. It features revelatory deathbed confessions, long-lost relatives, a femme fatale, a mysterious commune and even an investigative journalist for a protagonist. But beneath this sensationalist exterior lies a deeper rumination on time, trauma and the ties that Read More
The Goose Mistress: A Dark Love Story is Conner McAleese’s debut novel. He lives in Dundee and studied History, and Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee. Eva Braun is a historical figure – you either know who she was or you have never heard of her. It was the same during her Read More
With this moving and poetic novel, full of the rhythms of Gaelic and Doric, Donald Murray has created both a memorial and a song of love, grief and lament, reflected in the windswept landscapes of the Isle of Lewis. Narrated by Alasdair Cruikshank, retired Glasgow art teacher, grandson of Tormod Morrison, a fictional survivor of Read More
In a recent interview for The Guardian Valeria Luiselli complained that we demand too little of the novel as readers or as students of the form. In upholding “relatability” and “empathy” as praiseworthy qualities, we mistake what are entry level virtues for the high bar. It goes without saying then that this is an ambitious Read More
Freshwater follows the life of Ada, narrated by the gods who inhabited her at birth. What could be seen as a cluster of psychiatric disorders is depicted instead as a spiritual struggle of finding one’s way in the world, all happening in Ada’s head, in the marble room where all her selves are contained. Akwaeke Read More
Swan Song is a historical work of fiction, and the first novel by Texan Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. It re-tells the fantastic life of Truman Capote, author of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. With a playful interception on the rigidity of biography, it is written in a thrilling collective voice, an ‘our’ which weaves collective memory Read More