There are a lot of different ways to learn about magic. As many as there are people to have them. Mostly, they fall under three themes. Something horrible can happen to you, you can survive something or lose someone, and that can knock you into magic’s path. If you learn of magic through that, your Read More
She keeps her hands clasped together. She can see the chipped red nail varnish on her toenails. A strand of someone else’s hair disturbs the symmetry of the ceramic floor. Reflections from the water play on the wall. Coach watches her, not the other girls who are narrow shouldered and slim. He moves her elbows Read More
All I’ve ever really wanted to be is a writer. I want to be able to express myself through words, to write down my life, to tell stories about the lives of all the fictional people I have inside my head, to think myself worthy of poetry, to have nice stationary and a phenomenal desk. Read More
The light dies across the page of her book. She only likes to read in the daylight, the synthesized glow of her bedside lamp an intrusion on her imagination; the way it casts shadows from her fingers across her words a nuisance. It’s only four thirty, but already night is stealing in from wherever night Read More
The wide corridors seem all the more expansive, empty as they now are. I cannot fathom why they made them so wide and so long. I sit on a wooden bench and lean against the wall and stare off into the distance. My thoughts are blind, difficult and abstract but they seem to want to Read More
With Autumn, Ali Smith has written a work of such layered ingenuity that I’ve placed a bet on it to win the Booker. Smith, who has an enviable awards pedigree to her name – winner of the Whitbread, Baileys, Costa and Goldsmiths prizes and twice previously Booker-nominated, is one of those rare authors whose published Read More
Zadie Smith is no stranger to a literary award shortlist, but her fifth novel, Swing Time, is a particularly intriguing nominee for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Skilfully tackling complex issues of race, class and identity, Swing Time firstly gives us an honest and engaging insight into these subjects through the eyes of a seven-year-old Read More
With the release of the 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist thoughts must turn not only to the books listed but to the prize itself. Amongst the myriad of book prizes from local to global, from first novels to specific genres, why does this one stand out? How was this prize was inaugurated? British literary prizes Read More
“And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched.” Elmet is a contemporary novel, set in rural Yorkshire, yet it seems to take us to a different time and a different world. The reference to Ted Hughes’ poetry collection (Remains of Elmet) in the title of Read More
Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel is a modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. Though most of her novels have been decidedly international in flavour, Home Fire is a wholly British Greek tragedy. The complexities of incest and the law of god have been traded for the complexities of morality and the rule of state. A novel of Read More