Having studied Creative writing at Keele University, North Londoner Deborah Alma taught poetry. At the same time, based in a 1970s ambulance, she was also operating as an “Emergency Poet”, which involved working primarily with people reaching the end of their lives and with individuals suffering from dementia. Alma’s 2015 debut pamphlet True Tales of Read More
Shocking, harrowing, deeply disturbing, but beautifully imagined and described, Cynthia Bond’s novel Ruby will haunt you long after you put it down. It is essentially a love story set in small town America with many twists and turns, but it is in no way conventional. The love isn’t only between a man and a woman, Read More
Everybody deserves recognition for their creative achievements, unshadowed by backstories and illustrious family comparisons. Rightly, this courageous painter-poet has long been outspoken, criticising those choosing to play with her biography to suit their own ends. The press release is wisely oblique on this aspect. I turned away from the room’s elephant. Frieda Hughes is probably Read More
As the burning of the byre dies down it is “[a]s if the black gates of hell have been cast open.” The byre belonged to Barnabas Kane, his wife Eskra and their teenage son Billy, in this powerful, sad and unrelentingly dark novel by Paul Lynch, author of the much lauded Red Sky in Morning. Read More
A graduate of Northwestern University, Attica Locke was a Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab. She has been a scriptwriter for Paramount, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO and Dreamworks, and is currently a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. Locke’s focus is African-American cultural and political history and her 2010 Read More
Christopher Reid is a big tease. The titles of all 73 poems in his latest collection, The Curiosities, begin with the letter “C”. There’s a wide range of subjects covered between The Contents and The Credits but you won’t actually find THAT c-word in amongst “The Calabash”, “The Collarbone”, “The Celibate”, “The Canoodling”, “The Cufflinks” Read More
The possessing of multiple selves is a theme regularly explored in both psychology and in literature. For the most part, the issue has been treated formally; however this is not the case in Me, Me and Not Me by Tony Frisby. It is a text that, despite its important subject matter, still manages to retain Read More
With 24 hours to go until her daughter Agustina’s wedding, Constanza finds a spot of mildew like substance on her inner thigh. She does an internet search to try and discover what it is and the apparent normality of this reaction belies the truth of the mildew, which, like many aspects of this novel, may Read More
Somerset-born Avril Joy has chosen Depression-era Arkansas as a setting for this her second novel. Joy’s previous work includes the 2007 novel, The Sweet Track, and several short stories, some of which have been shortlisted for awards such as the Bridport and the Raymond Carver Short Story prize. She won the inaugural Costa Short Story Read More