“We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like ten guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love.” Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys’ Prize for Women’s Fiction, this is the third novel by Sandra Newman, who is American-born but resides in England. It may have missed Read More
Bearing in mind the danger of conflating the experiences of an author with those represented in their work, it is striking that the first sentence on Grace McCleen’s website runs as follows: “Grace McCleen was raised in a fundamentalist religion and for most of her life did not have much contact with unbelievers.” Madeline, the Read More
“Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable …” Sarah Waters fans will love her latest mighty tome (almost 600 pages), this time set amid the economic upheavals which followed the First World War. Frances Wray and her mother, living Read More
The Last Word is an uncomfortably honest read which deals with universal themes of the human condition such as love, ageing and the baggage of the past. Hanif Kureishi’s novel sets up these themes by centering the plot on the relationship between a young writer and Mamoon, an ageing, well-respected and controversial author whom he Read More
“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place anyway.” Despite having fallen in and out of favour with its audience several times over, Arthurian myth is a cornerstone of the British literary canon; it’s been the subject matter for poems, plays, novels, paintings, operas, and films, and is thoroughly embedded Read More
The Bees, Laline Paull’s dystopian novel, is a bizarre and often shocking allegory of the human world’s negotiation of difference, otherness, power and social hierarchies. Given the widespread use of pesticides and farming on an industrial scale, the book also functions as a timely reminder of our role in a global declining bee population, with Read More
Reading the runes of history as an intertext to the present, emphasising the circularity and tragedy of human lives or simply to give lie to the adage that the past is another country, has proved a rich novelistic seam. In the hands of a gifted writer such as Michael Ondaatje, archival texts, rendered with a Read More
Likely best known for The Dark Room, a debut which was both Man Booker listed and adapted for film, Rachel Seiffert may be a young writer, but already her achievements are remarkable. The Walk Home, her fourth novel, is set in Glasgow, a city the writer knows well. Specifically, the narrative is sited largely in Read More
I Am China is possibly Xiaolu Guo’s most ambitious work to date, combining the struggles of communication which she explored in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers with the snapshot, cinematic style of her 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. Much like that latter work, this novel is composed of an intricate collage of artefacts, Read More
In her career to date, Cusk has been loved and loathed in equal measure, as much for her forthright opinions as the quality of her writing. Outline is her eleventh work and, read in the light of her controversial memoirs about motherhood and divorce, blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. With a female novelist Read More