Hannah Lavery(Polygon, Birlinn, 2022); pbk. £10.99 As the title suggests, Hannah Lavery’s collection is a triptych possessing multiplicities. The reader is brought along through scenes and sights that could be from the author themselves, or could be anyone, yet which all share in the difficulties, tragedies, and memories that are embroiled in race, class, sexuality Read More
“Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.” Memento Mori is Muriel Spark’s third novel and seems, at first, to be a simple mystery novel with a “whodunnit” to be solved. But Spark is Read More
The Bachelors, sets London as a stage on which its characters perform giving the reader the same intimacy as sitting in the stalls. In his introduction, James Campbell notes that this novel, first published in 1960, was written at a time when Spark’s career was taking a turn towards the theatre. This is, in many Read More
As the title suggests, poverty is the central theme of Spark’s slim seventh novel, not just financial poverty but also a poverty of mind and spirit. Set primarily between VE Day and VJ Day, the novel’s central characters are the residents of the May of Tek Club, a boarding house in Kensington – For the Read More
“It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here.” This February marks 100 years since the birth of Scottish author Muriel Spark. In celebration of her life and work, Birlinn will re-publish all her novels under their Polygon imprint to commemorate the occasion. The Ballad of Peckham Rye is her fourth novel, now out Read More
As someone whose only prior dealings with the works of Muriel Spark came from a forced reading of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie many years ago, I was far from sure that I was going to like A Far Cry from Kensington. However, the book came as a pleasant surprise. The story follows the Read More
There is nothing lukewarm about Muriel Spark. In her writing she displays all the extravagance of an eccentric mind. Her eighth novel is set in Jerusalem in 1961, when the Mandelbaum Gate segregated Jerusalem into Jordan and Israel. As Gabriel Josipovici explains in his fine introduction to the 2018 Birlinn edition, this novel is Spark’s Read More
I sit in the hidden café of Bonar Hall (as a four-year undergrad student I had no idea it existed) waiting for Sandra Ireland. I hold her book in my hands and wonder what she’ll be like. The book is macabre and unsettling, dead gerbils as hand puppets and warm mugs of coffee in an Read More
Sandra Ireland’s debut novel Beneath the Skin haunts you from the moment you first turn the opening pages. Echoes of former traumas are deeply embedded in the lives of fully realised, broken characters and ring in the reader’s ears from the first moments. In a time of clichéd explosions in soda adverts, or brutal, overt Read More
Alan McKirdy’s first claim in Set in Stone is: “I am a geologist by accident rather than by design!” A happy accident, as it turns out, as McKirdy’s enthusiasm shines through in his book. Set in Stone is an attractive study of Scotland’s geology for several reasons. The most obvious of these reasons is the Read More
