Being a crime-fiction writer cannot be an easy job, trying to distinguish your work from so many others in an already crowded market. This pressure, coupled with the glut of crime shows like CSI or Criminal Minds that appear on television on a nightly basis, must make distinctiveness hard to come by. It is for this reason that I Read More
For readers familiar with Drown, Díaz’s earlier story collection, This Is How You Lose Her will be welcomed as a sequel of sorts. For those new to the author, this book shows he clearly deserves his place as one of America’s best, though not amongst its most prolific, writers. The book shares some similarities with Read More
Nothing is Heavy, Vicki Jarrett’s debut novel, is a blackly comic and compelling read. Jarrett is better known for her shorter fiction, some of which has been featured on BBC Radio 4. Shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2011, Nothing is Heavy is a confident and exciting work which confirms Jarrett’s skill as a Read More
Jacob M Appel won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012 for The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up. Appel is a bioethicist, essayist and fiction writer. Despite many of his short stories already having been published, Appel found it difficult to find a publisher for his debut novel at home saying, “American publishers appeared to Read More
Bullhead is the 2012 Academy Award nominated film by Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam. His other works include Carlos (2004), winner of the Audience Award at Leuven International Short Film Festival, and Today is Friday (2007) an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short, one act play of the same title. Bullhead stars Matthias Schoenaerts as Jacky Read More
“Dripping in Gothic tension”, the endorsement by Doug Johnstone on the cover of The Healing of Luther Grove, is an pretty accurate summation of the book. Barry Gornell’s debut novel, funded with the aid of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Bursary, contains all the elements of a traditional horror. Right from the first sentence, Read More
Given the massively popular and critical success of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, it was inevitable perhaps that The Heart Broke In did not win the Costa Award; however, it was a worthy contender, sharing the range of the great and very ambitious Russian family sagas of the 19th and 20th centuries. James Meek Read More
Havisham, is a book based on the life of Great Expectations’ Miss Catherine Havisham, the mad woman who, after being left at the altar, takes in the orphan Estella and teaches her to break the hearts of men. The book both shows the descent into madness of Dickens’s infamous character, but also explains how she Read More