Travelling on the train to Glasgow, I dug around in my bag and found my copy of Douglas Lindsay’s The Legend of Barney Thomson. The cover brandishes the phrase “now a major motion picture”, so it must be a good read, right? A brand new book, I timidly opened the rigid cover, careful not to Read More
Killochries has been termed Jim Carruth’s first full collection which is possibly unintentionally misleading. Five chapbooks, an illustrated fable and numerous awards lie between this and his already assured debut Bovine Pastoral. The inside cover’s description of a “verse novella” is considerably more accurate. This is a narrative, yet Killochries is neither quite a single Read More
One Moonlit Night, Caradog Prichard’s only lyrical Welsh-language novel, has been re-released in this new edition. The novel is a haunting conjuring of the bleaker and more disturbing features of daily life in Bethesda, a small village in North Wales, during World War One. Retaining Philip Mitchell’s sympathetic 1995 English translation, it also includes two Read More
“A story unfolds. It doesn’t fall into your lap, all sorted. You miss the significant bits, or you might hoard and file details that just don’t seem to matter.” So says the idiosyncratic narrator of Ian Stephen’s wonderful novel, A Book of Death and Fish, and the author certainly follows this non-pattern of writing himself. Read More
IC-98 is an artistic duo comprised of Finnish artists Visa Suonpää and Patrik Söderlund, who have been brought to the DCA through their work Abendland (Hours, Years, Aeons) after representing Finland in the latest Venice Biennale. The work is part of an ongoing documentation of their hometown Turku and its transition through unfolding social and Read More
Published 150 years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, this biography is a real treat of a read. Following his award winning biography of Charles Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst takes us on a marvellous journey through the mind of the quiet academic Charles Dodgson and his alter ego Lewis Carroll. “‘Who in the world am I?’ Read More
John Aubrey (1625-97) has done it again – namely, got someone else to write his book for him. An odd chain of events is thereby generated. Aubrey – endlessly busying himself in retrieving, preserving, and collating other people’s work, whether contemporary or in England’s recent past – left himself little time or energy to do Read More
Having been coaxed into seeing a horror film at a tender age, I’ve never since been able to gain enough distance from the gothic form to relish its thrills dispassionately. That half-glimpsed face in the darkened window or the unfamiliar shadow on the landing still results in one of those sudden irrational lurches of the Read More
German history of the 20th century is an ugly and twisted story to tell . Thomas Harding’s narrative of The House by the Lake takes a personal yet critical approach to this subject. He tells the story of a weekend house at Lake Glienecke, built and once owned by Harding’s Jewish ancestors at the edge of Read More
Already an award-winning writer for her short fiction, Sara Baume’s debut novel is in contention for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award. Spill Simmer Falter Wither is set in a nameless coastal town over the course of a year, the book being split up into four “seasons”: the titular spill, simmer, falter and wither (or Read More