Jacques Strauss’ The Curator is, first and foremost, disturbing and unsettling. It makes you feel repulsed and disgusted, yet eager to read on. Set in Strauss’ native South Africa, flitting between the events of 1976 and 1996, its plot simultaneously shows the immediate aftermath of the murder of a family and how the effects of Read More
For ye shall hear, how our heaven king Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning: Give audience, and hear what he doth say. ~ Messenger, The Somonyng of Everyman In some ways, it takes a certain amount of enterprise to put on a play that has been around for half a millennium; it becomes a distinct sort Read More
Sara Maitland recently wrote in The Guardian (5th March 2015): “I believe that most of us have a deep yearning for the magical, for a secret ‘otherness’, for an environment flowing with abundance – not just with nature but with super-nature too”. To that end, she urged the trustees of Wayford Woods, near Crewkerne, not Read More
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is much-coveted; though newly published, it feels entrenched in the nature-writing canon already. From the exquisite cover and fine end-papers on, it should be owned by all lovers of landscape and language. Perhaps that is as far as Landmarks can, and should, be categorised. Macfarlane’s prose-poetic text calls for “a decentred eye Read More
Our attempts to understand the nature of forgiveness often involve making distinctions by degrees. Forgiving someone for being late for an appointment seems simple compared to an accident when bodily harm has been caused. Making these kinds of distinctions provides us with a better sense of when forgiveness can be offered. But what if making Read More
D. A. Prince’s work was previously better known to me through her once-regular contributions to the New Statesman’s weekly competition, a minor literary institution and an endless source of humorous invention. I had wondered whether Prince’s published poetry would draw from that same vein of playful humour and subversion, but what I found in these Read More
Freight Books presents novelist and short story writer Vicki Jarrett’s debut short story collection The Way Out. This short and bittersweet cluster of tales is an offering which undoubtedly reveals the author as a talent to watch, with both capacity and potential that will keep her audience engaged. The collection has an interesting cohesion despite Read More
Any collection containing a piece called “The Best Poem Ever Written” has already thrown away its safety net, its right to complacency under scrutiny. Presenting such a direct challenge to any reader (or, indeed, any writer) slaps down the gauntlet; the work simply must be good. Highly commended for various poetry prizes, Graham Clifford’s reputation Read More
Susanne Bier’s A Second Chance (En Chance Til) begins with police officer Andreas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his partner Simon (Ulrich Thomsen) breaking into the home of a drug-addicted couple, where they find a neglected baby boy covered in his own faeces. Unable to remove the child from his parents’ custody, Andreas returns to his own wife Read More
Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning, chronicles the lives and loves of three generations of the Bradshaw family, spanning a period from 1916 to the 1970s. Yanique has drawn upon her own Virgin Islands ancestry to weave this atmospheric tale, set against the political emergence of the island of St. Thomas as Read More