When someone loves only one piece of literature throughout their lifetime, should that devotion be admired or pitied? Acclaimed Irish writer Mary Costello’s second novel, The River Capture, offers a deeply philosophical contemplation of humanity rendered through the mind of a James Joyce obsessive. It is also an ambitious act of dedication to Joyce’s Ulysses, Read More
Oh, shut up! Oonu can’t work widout talk! Thank God the man at the Embassy say that she would hear from them in another month or so. Hazel D. Campbell’s collected short stories opens in a cramped office with a young woman frustrated at her older colleagues’ gossip, daydreaming about her imminent move to America. Read More
Alexandra Ford’s debut novel, What Remains at the End? is a fearless attempt to convey the atrocities suffered by Danube Swabians in 1940s Yugoslavia at the hands of Tito’s Partisan regime. Many of this German-speaking ethnic minority fled, seeking refuge as far as America; of those who stayed, tens of thousands died, either perishing in Read More
There is something almost unbearable in the experience of reading Annaleese Jochems’s debut novel, yet at the same time Baby is utterly arresting, oozing with sex and tension in a sickly-sweet package. Nothing embodies this concept more than Jochems’s protagonist, Cynthia. At first, she appears to be a sheltered, childishly naive young woman. Nevertheless, Cynthia Read More
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint winner of the Booker Prize 2019, was eagerly anticipated despite a high bar having already been set by its popular predecessor The Handmaid’s Tale, which encapsulated the potential consequences of suppressing women. The handmaid Offred, in her iconic white veil and red dress, became a symbol of feminism now Read More
Everything seems to be going wrong in Endland. Gods are being banished from Olympus and forced into dead-end jobs, a teenager vanishes after she uploads herself to the internet, and even the space-time continuum is in danger thanks to two alcoholic, quantum physics enthusiasts. It is a place of abuse and negligence, and all its Read More
A psychological thriller, entwining local myth and legend with modern day themes of love, loyalty and survival, The Unmaking of Ellie Rook leads on from Sandra Ireland’s previous works, Beneath the Skin and Bone Deep, to explore the dark side of family dynamics, skewed loyalties and emotional manipulation. Set in a fictional village based around Read More
Ducks, Newburyport is Lucy Ellmann’s eighth novel. This is a big book by any standard. In it I met a woman who made me look at the world her way: a working Mom, anxious about her four children, worried about Trump, the state of America, gun violence, and broken by the death of her mother, Read More
A 36-year-old queer working-class migrant arrives on the Isle of Wight and gets a job with best friend Shae in a trashy hotel with an absent boss and equally hard to pin down wages. Attempts to gain citizenship amidst the Brexit chaos are constantly thwarted, UKIP supporters lurk on street corners, and an alcoholic parent Read More
Amy Arnold’s novel Slip of a Fish is an exuberant exploration into whether language can be trusted to convey meaning; the protagonist, Ash, collects words as a way of coping with the confusion they cause her, whilst Arnold’s own inventive literary styling gradually exposes this complex inner mind to readers. Abbott says there’s no need, Read More