Ten years ago, a brilliant and shrewd mind emerged out of the social and political schisms of India. As if firing arrows, Aravind Adiga scribed his fictional arriviste hero’s every thought and deed in his 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, The White Tiger, with sufficient force and accuracy that its target – India – Read More
Award-winning novelist Dame Fiona Kidman published her tenth novel in New Zealand in 2016. All Day at the Movies took the New Zealand Heritage Prize for Fiction in 2016 and is now published in the UK in a new imprint for Gallic Books. Set in New Zealand, the novel begins in 1952, as war widow Read More
Barker’s twelfth novel is a wonderfully unusual phantasmagoria of narrative and typography. It takes place in a future which has been rebuilt after the “Floods and the Fires and the Plagues and the Death Cults”; where ambition, ego, desire, death and poverty no longer exist. This calm, sustainable new world is inhabited by “The Young” Read More
This must be one of the most shocking novels of 2017. In it, the author recounts the ordeal of a violent and abusive marriage. Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018, it has also been nominated as Book of the Year by Read More
Elif Batuman has had remarkable success with her debut novel, The Idiot. The American author, academic and journalist has long been a non-fiction writer for The New Yorker, but her turn to fiction has already garnered her critical acclaim – she was a Pulitzer prize finalist and made it onto the shortlist for the Women’s Read More
Ali Bacon is a graduate of the University of St Andrews and worked as a librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford. Her first novel, Kettle of Fish, was published by Thornberry in 2012. In the Blink of an Eye is set in Victorian Edinburgh and charts the fortunes of two pioneering photographers, Robert Adamson and Read More
Imogen Hermes Gower’s debut novel, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, is a beautifully written slice of Georgian life that depicts the fortunes of a widower merchant, an ambitious courtesan, and a mermaid. Gower’s London is intricate and robust; she uses her background in archaeology and anthropology to breathe life into the city through the smallest Read More
“They all want the Germans gone, just like you do. But don’t be thinking that makes you welcome”. Set in the Ukraine in 1941, one of the darkest periods of that country’s history, Seiffert’s story is told in language which seems, in a remarkable way, to echo the rhythms of the native language of her Read More
On the cover of Lia Purpura’s marvellous collection of lyric essays, On Looking, there is a close-up photograph of a strange bony object with clavicle-like hollows and spinal protuberances. Our classroom exchanges about exactly what this represents always lead to discussions on Purpura’s themes and poetics. Jessie Greengrass’s second book will spark exactly those kinds Read More
“The day before the murder, George Bull tried to poison me with a cheese sandwich.” With this hook, Maria Donovan opens her debut novel, The Chicken Soup Murder. The narrator is eleven-year-old Michael Davies, battling lactose intolerance alongside the perplexities of impending adolescence in a small coastal town in Dorset. Michael lives with his Nan Read More