Picture, if you will, the tropical growth of a Caribbean island: where venomous snakes writhe among a multitude of indigenous fruits and flowers; where mothers make everything from guava jelly to poultices designed either to ward off evil spirits or attract good ones; where farm boys work hard to sustain their families but squander their Read More
Once Claire was asleep again, the professor removed a chunk of her brain – the ‘epileptogenic’ part – and dropped it into a bin. ‘What was that chunk responsible for?’ I asked him. He shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said; ‘we just know it’s not eloquent.’ The dedication at the front of this book is simply Read More
The Land Agent is the third novel in The Glasgow to Galilee trilogy, and is a fictional narrative set within an historical context. Each of the books in The Glasgow to Galilee trilogy – The Credit Draper, The Liberation of Celia Khan and The Land Agent – can be read either in sequence or as Read More
“I’m here. I’m here.” In “distance”, the last story in Jellyfish, Janice Galloway’s first short fiction collection in five years, the final words may be simple, but in the context of the collection as a whole, they say so much. Galloway’s characters are trapped in a variety of mundane situations; they tolerate, despair, endure, succumb, Read More
Dante drives the borrowed squad car direct. He’s an accident of flesh and blunt bones Shaped human, ugly and mostly scowling, Made bitter by the job and the city. A 2013 graduate of Dundee University’s MLitt in Writing Practice and Study, Ollie Langmead’s first publication is a sci-fi neo-noir murder-mystery, told entirely in Miltonesque decasyllabic Read More
“The longing for home and the longing for love are so alike as to be inseparable.” Malachy Tallack, journalist, musician, song-writer, is one of a new generation of travel writers for whom a journey is as much an opportunity for philosophical musings as a geographical experience. Like many of us, myself included, who spend much Read More
In Hearth, prize-winning poets Sarah James and Angela Topping have co-created an engaging sequence of “poetry duets”; paired poems that echo and spar, diverge and re-convene in that common ground of home, hearth and memory. Only the first and last poems are collaborative; the others retain each poet’s highly individual voice, yet harmonise effortlessly. The Read More
“Before I Knocked” – the title is from a Dylan Thomas poem – focuses on three images from the past: a postcard sent from California to Belfast in 1931; a photograph of two British soldiers in Jerusalem during World War II; and a family snapshot taken on an Irish beach in 1954. The essay unravels/imagines Read More
Rosemary Goring’s sequel to her debut novel After Flodden is set ten years later in 1523, but begins with a brief prologue immediately following the battle in 1513 which sets the scene for Dacre’s War and connects the main protagonist, Lord Thomas Dacre, to both storylines. Set in the border country which continues to be Read More
Alice in Wonderland is quite absurd, mostly improbable, but generally not stupid. The reason for this final attribution is that there is an underlying reason why ridiculousness reigns over wonderland. In Carroll’s novel, the reason is rather lazily explained as it “all having been a dream”, but this distinction between implausible and stupid is something Read More