DURA homepage
Skip main navigation menu
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact Us
  • A-Z
  • Submissions
Skip main content

Featured image of Washington Black

Washington Black

The story of George Washington Black is told in the first person by Esi Edugyan’s protagonist of the same name in her Man Booker shortlisted novel. Starting as an eleven-year-old field slave in Faith Plantation in Barbados in 1830,  the conditions of his slave life in the harsh setting of the sugar plantation  is  perhaps Read More

Featured image of The Overstory

The Overstory

The Overstory is about trees. There’s more to it, but trees (‘The most wondrous products of four billion years of life’) are at its core. The novel casts no illusions about its focus or its intent, leading the reader into a sublime wander through forests and parks, building rage at the injustice meted out to Read More

Featured image of THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS (Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017)

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS (Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017)

Of rain and rushing water, dense with coils of razor wire masquerading as weeds. The fish were machine guns with fins and barrels that ruddered through the swift current like mermaids’ tails, so you could not tell who they were really pointed at, and who would die when they were fired. Perhaps the quotation above Read More

Featured image of Fever Dream (Shortlisted, Man Booker International Prize 2017)

Fever Dream (Shortlisted, Man Booker International Prize 2017)

“They’re like worms. What kind of worms? Like worms, all over.” Two voices present themselves: one in question, one in answer; a child and a mother, yet sharing no relation. The subject of conversation is unclear, the situation likewise. We know only a sense of unease. As the dialogue unfolds, the child, David, guides the Read More

Featured image of The Many (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

The Many (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

Wyl Menmuir (Salt, 2016); pbk. £8.99 “Who was Perran?” This is the question that Timothy, the main character in Wyl Menmuir’s debut novel, The Many, continues to ask, and it’s a question we find ourselves asking too, especially towards the tragic conclusion. A definitive answer is never forthcoming however, and this is partly why The Read More

Featured image of A Brief History of Seven Killings (Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize)

A Brief History of Seven Killings (Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize)

Last autumn, I asked Kei Miller for the names of contemporary Jamaican writers he thought I ought to read. The first name on his lips was Marlon James. I bought The Book of Night Women and A Brief History of Seven Killings, but as is the way of many good intentions, both titles overwintered unread Read More

Featured image of The Year of the Runaways

The Year of the Runaways

Sanjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways could not have been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize at any better a moment than in the current political climate. Sahota’s political novel outlines the lives of three Indian migrant workers and Narinder, an Indian-British woman fighting her own personal battle between morals and abiding by the Read More

Featured image of Satin Island

Satin Island

Despite the old adage, it is difficult to avoid being influenced by a books cover. With its open colour wheel, composed of eleven segments that transition from red through to violet, the last two of which are coated in a glossy coat of dripping oil, the minimalist design of Satin Island’s hardback edition gives little away. Intrigued, Read More

DURA facebook page

Copyright © 2025 DURA :: Dundee Review of the Arts (DURA)