With its stylish cover and alluring title, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel is as striking as it looks. My Sister, the Serial Killer tells you everything you need to know before the opening pages. But that’s not to say it’s predictable and doesn’t surprise at times. The novel centres around two sisters, Korede, a nurse, and Read More
Following the success of his 2016 crowdfunded anthology The Good Immigrant, Nikesh Shukla returns with his latest novel. The One Who Wrote Destiny features some of the issues surrounding race in the UK that were the basis of The Good Immigrant but offers a whole lot more. It is a story about family, loss, and Read More
This must be one of the most shocking novels of 2017. In it, the author recounts the ordeal of a violent and abusive marriage. Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018, it has also been nominated as Book of the Year by Read More
With Storms Gertrude and Imogen raging outside, Kim Leine’s The Prophets of Eternal Fjord has kept me going all winter. The biblical proportions of the book itself make it unwieldy, and trying to read it in bed feels suitably like an act of penance. Physical and mental hardship defines life in colonial Greenland in the Read More
With his first collection of short stories, Christos Tsiolkas is successful in looking with a new perspective at subjects which have often been considered to be taboo. The protagonists in Merciless Gods are misfits and junkies exploring their sexual identity. Almost all of the stories are set in Australia, where Tsiolkas himself grew up, and Read More
“The Fireman’s Wife”, a short story by Richard Bausch, is, to my mind, one of the best short stories written in English. It’s up there for me along with Joyce’s “The Dead”, Mansfield’s “At the Bay” Carver’s “Blackbird Pie” and all the stories I value that, in a few pages, have brought a whole world, 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
There is something deeply wrong with this book. The problem is not the subject matter. The Internet Is Not the Answer is an attack on the way a crude ideology of “winner-takes-all” capitalism is shaping the Internet today through companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and, more revealingly, through newer companies like Instagram, Uber Read More