After a ten year absence which at times has felt almost as unbearable as the pregnant silences that characterise his texts, Kazuo Ishiguro has returned with his seventh novel, The Buried Giant. Set in post-Arthurian Britain, the book follows Axl and Beatrice, two elderly Britons, as they set off across country to visit their son, Read More
Following on from her previous novel The Midwife’s Daughter, Patricia Ferguson returns to the sleepy Cornish town of Silkhampton to tell the story of both new and also some familiar characters. Set in the early 1930s, the book revolves around three women, all widely different but drawn together by circumstance into a situation which will Read More
Lissa Evans’ fourth novel, Crooked Heart, brings to the table a new story with old bones. Set in World War 2 England, one would expect it to be another historical drama, rife with tales of heroism and loss, of tragedy and hope. As you traverse the pages however, you find humour in the place of Read More
“Hell is other people” Jean-Paul Satre’s famous words permeate the text of Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station 11, where a virus wiping out 99% of the Earth’s population leads its survivors to realise how alone in the world they can truly be. The story opens with a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, starring Read More
Bearing in mind the danger of conflating the experiences of an author with those represented in their work, it is striking that the first sentence on Grace McCleen’s website runs as follows: “Grace McCleen was raised in a fundamentalist religion and for most of her life did not have much contact with unbelievers.” Madeline, the Read More
“Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable …” Sarah Waters fans will love her latest mighty tome (almost 600 pages), this time set amid the economic upheavals which followed the First World War. Frances Wray and her mother, living Read More
The Last Word is an uncomfortably honest read which deals with universal themes of the human condition such as love, ageing and the baggage of the past. Hanif Kureishi’s novel sets up these themes by centering the plot on the relationship between a young writer and Mamoon, an ageing, well-respected and controversial author whom he Read More
“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place anyway.” Despite having fallen in and out of favour with its audience several times over, Arthurian myth is a cornerstone of the British literary canon; it’s been the subject matter for poems, plays, novels, paintings, operas, and films, and is thoroughly embedded Read More
Reading the runes of history as an intertext to the present, emphasising the circularity and tragedy of human lives or simply to give lie to the adage that the past is another country, has proved a rich novelistic seam. In the hands of a gifted writer such as Michael Ondaatje, archival texts, rendered with a Read More
Likely best known for The Dark Room, a debut which was both Man Booker listed and adapted for film, Rachel Seiffert may be a young writer, but already her achievements are remarkable. The Walk Home, her fourth novel, is set in Glasgow, a city the writer knows well. Specifically, the narrative is sited largely in Read More