If I touched the Earth is Cynthia Rogerson’s fifth novel. The Canadian born author has lived in the UK for more than 30 years and boasts an impressive literary reputation as winner of the V.S. Pritchett Prize in 2008. Further boosting her popularity is the fact that, as a Scottish Book Trust Live Author, she Read More
This collection of 12 short stories by the veteran Ghanian author Ama Ata Aidoo, reflects concerns with the displacement of people, particularly women, who move between two cultures: their African homeland and that of the developed world. Her work has inspired younger African authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who regards Aidoo as a mentor Read More
Take fourteen contemporary fiction writers and pair them with researchers working in diverse fields of bio-medical science; have the writers produce short stories dealing in the speculative ethical consequences of the research, from the utopian to the Frankensteinian; allow a dedicated researcher (or team of researchers) to respond to each story, highlighting technical details of Read More
The Soap Opera is an ever popular genre of TV drama but to find a soap opera in print is rare. This might explain the popularity of Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series. The latest edition in the series, Sunshine on Scotland Street, with its titular allusions to the song and subsequent musical Sunshine on Read More
Lakshmi Persaud’s fifth novel, Daughters of Empire,is a novel about making a home away from home. It centres around the lives of Amira and her family, Trinidadian Hindus, as they migrate from Trinidad to London. Amira and her daughters flourish as they impact upon and embrace the new culture around them. By contrast, Amira’s older Read More
Cold Sea Stories is the latest fictional work from veteran Polish writer Paweł Huelle, and was translated into English from the original Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. As its title suggests, the book is a collection of thematically linked short stories set in the Baltic region: the “cold sea” of the title. Huelle draws upon historical Read More
It has always been difficult to give an adequate definition of the Modernist movement in literature that does justice to its complexities. What we can be certain of is Modernism’s complete departure from tradition. In Umbrella, which could be described as Will Self’s most experimental piece of work to date, the reader is without a Read More
Swimming Home, Deborah Levy’s first novel for fifteen years, is a slim volume which has the outward appearance of a novella rather than a novel. This, coupled with what seems to be a somewhat conventional storyline of marital infidelity in a holiday villa in the south of France, makes Levy’s book, at first sight, an Read More
Bashabi Fraser