‘Dear Diary, go fuck yourself’ opens I Am Not Okay With This, author and artist Charles Forsman’s latest graphic novel, a line that made me laugh with its direct belligerence. An opening like this, coupled with the comic’s cartoon art style – reminiscent to me of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work – lured me into expecting Read More
Hannah Sullivan’s first book of poems breathes, from the tumultous living of the opening poem through a steadier still-vibrant growth in the second, to the painful inspirations of the third. Having led an academic career on both sides of the Atlantic, she’s translated her keen observations of the minutia of existence into something moving and Read More
In her latest novel, Kirsty Gunn takes a brave and original approach. Conscious of the language she uses, capable of creating memorable metaphors and telling parts of the story through characters’ distinctive dialogues, the author makes a bet. She believes that she can almost entirely remove plot from the book and make it worthwhile for Read More
Anatomy of a Soldier is the debut novel of Harry Parker. He joined the British Army when he was twenty three and served as a Captain in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You would be forgiven for thinking that an adventurous tale of derring-do would fit this profile, but in this book the author should be Read More
Nick Laird (Faber & Faber, 2015); pbk £10.99 Laird and I share the hometown of Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, right in the heart of Mid-Ulster. A busy market-town, it was relatively quiet during the Troubles, in comparison at least with the hotspots of Belfast and Derry/Londonderry. But it was not untouched. This common experience of growing Read More
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance seems poetic, personal and political on the one page and then dismissive and cynical on the very next. The novel is the perfect microcosm of the nihilistic modern world, and when that dystopia is set in the historically romantic city of Paris, it turns into a symbol of tragedy. Read More
Robert Crawford’s biography is probably the best account so far of how The Waste Land came to be written, and what resources it drew upon. This is not to treat the poem teleologically, as though Eliot had always been working towards it. Rather, the biography simply acknowledges (not least by its subtitle) that Eliot would Read More