At its simplest, established writer Frank Woods’ debut novel Where the Bridge Lies is a melodramatic detective story. It features revelatory deathbed confessions, long-lost relatives, a femme fatale, a mysterious commune and even an investigative journalist for a protagonist. But beneath this sensationalist exterior lies a deeper rumination on time, trauma and the ties that Read More
The Goose Mistress: A Dark Love Story is Conner McAleese’s debut novel. He lives in Dundee and studied History, and Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee. Eva Braun is a historical figure – you either know who she was or you have never heard of her. It was the same during her Read More
With this moving and poetic novel, full of the rhythms of Gaelic and Doric, Donald Murray has created both a memorial and a song of love, grief and lament, reflected in the windswept landscapes of the Isle of Lewis. Narrated by Alasdair Cruikshank, retired Glasgow art teacher, grandson of Tormod Morrison, a fictional survivor of Read More
In a recent interview for The Guardian Valeria Luiselli complained that we demand too little of the novel as readers or as students of the form. In upholding “relatability” and “empathy” as praiseworthy qualities, we mistake what are entry level virtues for the high bar. It goes without saying then that this is an ambitious Read More
Freshwater follows the life of Ada, narrated by the gods who inhabited her at birth. What could be seen as a cluster of psychiatric disorders is depicted instead as a spiritual struggle of finding one’s way in the world, all happening in Ada’s head, in the marble room where all her selves are contained. Akwaeke Read More
Swan Song is a historical work of fiction, and the first novel by Texan Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. It re-tells the fantastic life of Truman Capote, author of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. With a playful interception on the rigidity of biography, it is written in a thrilling collective voice, an ‘our’ which weaves collective memory Read More
‘You don’t know if you like animals but you’re desperate to have one, you want a creature.’ So starts this captivating and strange novel by Rosenthal in this new translation by award-winning translator Sophie Lewis of the 2010 original. Is To Leave with the Reindeer a novel, though? The book’s writing is a hybrid of Read More
Art imitates life, they say, and it’s impossible to read John Lanchester’s latest novel, The Wall, without making comparisons to current political situations. Such a trifecta for a dystopian novel – a wall, migrants, climate change – seems almost too predictable, and Lanchester uses it with mixed success. The novel shows a future where ‘The Read More
Called on its cover ‘a novella in flash’, Bottled Goods follows on from Sophie Van Llewyn’s award-winning flash fiction pieces. This seems a clever move, allowing the author to mix different voices, tenses and forms, never allowing the reader to settle, and mirroring the increasingly jittery and fracturing nature of the life of Alina, the Read More
A modern revision of a classic Greek myth is no longer a unique concept. Perhaps this is thanks in part to Madeline Miller’s bestselling debut novel The Song of Achilles, which helped to popularise the idea. Nor is it especially original any more to give maligned women from popular stories ‘the Wicked treatment’, painting them Read More