The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Decades after leaving Iran as a child refugee, Dina Nayeri travels back to the location, both psychological and geographical, in which she waited for her asylum claim to be processed. Late in this powerful memoir, after a particularly distressing moment in her research, Nayeri must remind herself why she feels compelled to return to those early moments of her life: ‘Now that I have a daughter, it’s time I made sense of my own story and identity so she can be certain of hers.’ It is, of course, a common enough experience to find oneself reflecting on one’s origins, but to return to the themes and scenarios of Nayeri’s youth takes an especially courageous and direct gaze.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story

Polly Morland’s book builds on the irony of first finding a copy of The Fortunate Man (1967) hanging ‘in suspended animation’ while clearing out her mother’s house, John Berger’s witness account of the vicissitudes of a country doctor’s life in the same Gloucestershire valley in which the author now resides. This find sets in motion a series of emotionally charged events pinning memory, persons, place to what it is to be a woman GP in a country practice in the last two years of Covid.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks combines an exploration of consciousness and mortality, framed within a personal experience of losing his wife to cancer. He warns the reader it is a ‘rambling, ramshackle house they’re about to enter’ where ‘fact sits alongside fiction’ and ‘science tangles with myth’. Acknowledging a shared human fragility, he intersperses descriptions of patients with neurological disorders who ’inhabit the twilight zones of the mind’ with a meandering series of visits to some of his own.

In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, an inventive mining of the darker side of folk and fairy tales, was hailed in 2018 as one of 15 books by women ‘shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’ Her memoir, In the Dream House, offers Read More

A short interview with Phillip Lopate

In June 2018 I interviewed Philip Lopate, who is probably the most famous living essayist in the world. On camera.* It was something I’d never done before, and to say I was nervous is an understatement. I shook hands with him the day before and heard him deliver his keynote for the ‘Taking ideas for Read More

WAYPOINTS: SEASCAPES AND STORIES OF SCOTLAND’S WEST COAST

There are certain realities accessible only to a handful of people. Across 300 pages this book takes the reader to the unique reality of Scotland’s West Coast and offers a detailed account of life and culture in the region. However, as every reality, it’s not for everyone.  Ian Stephen comes from the Isle of Lewis Read More

The Idea of North

In Brussels in 1511, figures are sculpted from the snow that has fallen for weeks.  They include commissions sculpted by artists and the subjects Charon, Pluto and assorted Devils. Winter has brought the beauty recorded in Breughel’s playful paintings to the southern Netherlands. It also destroys. It kills. This dichotomy is central to Peter Davidson’s Read More

Common Ground

“This little patch of ground was exactly that: common. And all the richer for it.” In a sense, this sentence summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of Common Ground. In particular, pragmatic people are likely to ask: “If it is so common, what warrants writing so extensively about it?” From a reductive perspective, one might Read More