Nina Mingya Powles’ invigorating first full poetry collection is not called just Magnolia. The Chinese characters 木蘭 that complete the title – transliterated as ‘mulan’ – are an important clue as to the nature of her work, suffused as it is with layers of meaning across different languages. Born in 1993, in New Zealand, of Read More
Citadel is Martha Sprackland’s first full collection, following two previous pamphlets (Glass as Broken Glass in 2017 and Milk Tooth in 2018) and a raft of poetry editing credentials. The slim volume carries fifty poems and has a density to the reading. This stems from the complex premise packed into the work: a historical reimagining Read More
Former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway explores the delicate intersection of faith and reality in his 31st book. Carefully examining the relationship between religion, belief, and perception, Stories We Tell Ourselves is written as much for others as himself. Holloway feels a path forward, navigating the fallout of a millennia of reading our species’ stories Read More
Manual for a Decent Life is Kavita Jindal’s debut novel and winner of the 2018 Brighthorse Prize. Jindal is a founder member of the Asian women’s writing collective, The Full Kahani (in English, The Whole Story), which produced May We Borrow Your Country?, a collection of poetry and short stories, published in 2019 by Linen Read More
Rarely do works of historical fiction immerse the reader in the protagonist’s thoughts so completely as in this last volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Written in the first person, from Cromwell’s point of view, Mantel’s narrative is so convincing that it is sometimes difficult not to take this for Thomas Cromwell’s actual memoirs. Read More
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, an inventive mining of the darker side of folk and fairy tales, was hailed in 2018 as one of 15 books by women ‘shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’ Her memoir, In the Dream House, offers Read More
In this latest collection of poems, David Morley, prize-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, puts his versatile lyrical toolkit on display. Sustaining his interest in the Romany gypsy community, its mythology and folklore—subjects of his previous Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Choice books, The Invisible Kings and The Gypsy and the Read More
We carry it around in our heads and visit the places where it once visited: Charlotte Square, gates locked to this greenest of glades since the last of the new turf was laid last year; now marked in time as the last time. I mark it idling at high railings reanimating stills of a once-tented Read More
‘I cannot live, just fucking let me die.’ Whether intentionally or not, James Womack’s translation, if we can call it that, of Maximian’s Elegies comes at a rather appropriate time. A global pandemic ravaging the world with seemingly no end in sight, ecological and societal collapse perhaps just a few decades around the corner, we Read More
I had never left home before. Aside from holidays, I hadn’t lived anywhere that wasn’t Dundee. Last summer, I did at the age of twenty-five what most people do at eighteen; I moved to Leeds, into student accommodation for my work placement. I was forced to make a home for myself in an unfamiliar place. Read More