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Featured image of Who Is Mary Sue?

Who Is Mary Sue?

I first encountered the pejorative term ‘Mary Sue’ in a critical review of Samantha Shannon’s Bone Season and can still recall my bemusement; Shannon had secured an impressive seven-book deal with Bloomsbury yet stood accused of creating merely an idealised projection of herself. It is this gendered injustice which Sophie Collins now examines in her Read More

Featured image of Deaf Republic (Shortlisted, 2019 TS Eliot Poetry Prize; Winner, 2019 Forward Poetry Prize)

Deaf Republic (Shortlisted, 2019 TS Eliot Poetry Prize; Winner, 2019 Forward Poetry Prize)

Deaf Republic begins with a gunshot. As an innocent deaf boy falls to the ground, the townspeople choose silence over the sound of a child’s body hitting the street, a sound that would be filled with pain and injustice: ‘The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water’. The rest of the Read More

Featured image of Freshwater (Longlisted, 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction)

Freshwater (Longlisted, 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction)

Freshwater follows the life of Ada, narrated by the gods who inhabited her at birth. What could be seen as a cluster of psychiatric disorders is depicted instead as a spiritual struggle of finding one’s way in the world, all happening in Ada’s head, in the marble room where all her selves are contained. Akwaeke Read More

Featured image of Normal People (Longlisted, 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction)

Normal People (Longlisted, 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction)

In her second novel, Sally Rooney delivers a compelling love story set in the West of Ireland and grounded in the political realities of recent times. Normal People was hotly anticipated, well received, and continues to see Rooney lauded as a generational writer. Nevertheless, the passivity with which the millennial label is applied within critical Read More

Featured image of A Life of Adventure and Delight

A Life of Adventure and Delight

Simple stories are sometimes the most appealing ones. Love, trying to fit in or to find oneself are examples of themes present not only in Akhil Sharma’s short story collection, but also in the everyday lives of most people. However, these topics are also painfully commonplace in art and culture, and thus often feel cliched Read More

Featured image of Stranger, Baby (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

Stranger, Baby (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

“The loss of a mother must be something very strange…”. This epigraph from Sigmund Freud sets the scene for Emily Berry’s superb second collection, Stranger, Baby, which concerns the sense of dislocation, “dismantlement” and alterity brought about by intense grief. The suicide of her mother left the narrator/Berry all at sea from the age of Read More

Featured image of THE LESSER BOHEMIANS (LONGLISTED, 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE)

THE LESSER BOHEMIANS (LONGLISTED, 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE)

You may not like this book at first. I didn’t. The prose is ungrammatical and sometimes incomprehensible.  For instance:  “he at wall.  I the edge.  Back to.  Sheet damp.” But be patient, for these are thoughts, and thoughts don’t care about grammar. They often omit words and leave gaps, and simply splash images and emotions Read More

Featured image of Brother

Brother

Perhaps we all long for a more carefree period in our lives. Nostalgia for childhood is almost universal; however, this outwardly innocent melancholy is ultimately dangerous as by its very nature nostalgia romanticises and we forget the past’s real darkness. In Brother, award-winning American poets Matthew and Michael Dickman’s latest collaborative collection, the sibling poets Read More

Featured image of The Seasons of Cullen Church

The Seasons of Cullen Church

Originally from Cullen, Co. Cork, Bernard O’Donoghue has been an English don at Oxford University since 1965. This is his sixth collection. O’Donoghue has been a recipient of the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize for Poetry and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2008.Being shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize (for the best collection of Read More

Featured image of The Gustav Sonata (Longlisted, 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize)

The Gustav Sonata (Longlisted, 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize)

Rose Tremain’s masterful, melancholic and ambitious novel is brimful of the sights and smells of post-war Switzerland, leaving little to the imagination.  Dispelling myths of serene neutrality, her book leads us though a winding path of uncertainty and angst, where “neutrality” is replaced with thorny indifference and there is little grey area between friendship and servitude. In this tantalising tale of adolescence, we follow Gustav Perle on his struggle of discovery. There are few heart-warming moments Read More

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