Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize in 2010, Zoe Venditozzi’s Anywhere’s Better Than Here lives up to the expectations created by such a nomination. The novel tells the story of Laurie, a woman who is fed up with her life, particularly her gaming-addicted boyfriend and her tedious job, and depicts the adventure she is Read More
“On a wind lashed coast in the far north a group of men assemble on a construction site. The Ness and Struie Drainage Project will dominate their lives for the next few months as they toil through the daylight hours and into the night, endure hardship and conflict and –mostly- survive.” So begins the blurb Read More
The title of Tom Wright’s debut novel What Dies in Summer suggests that it is a bog-standard contemporary crime thriller. It is a long-standing cliché, for instance, for crime novels to use the word “death” or one of its derivatives in their titles. With its depiction of a young female with her back to the Read More
In “Tamagotchi”, one of the short stories in Adam Marek’s second collection, The Stone Thrower, the narrator wonders “what kind of demented mind would create a child’s toy” that was capable of catching AIDS. Reading through whole collection, it is at times difficult not to wonder about the state of mind of the author himself. Read More
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