Man At Sea

iam Bell’s Man at Sea is a genre-defying delight that interrogates and reimagines the classic war novel. A domestic mystery set in Malta across the 1940s and 1960s, Man at Sea, follows the story of a former airman trying to reunite his old friend, Beth, with the son of her late wartime husband. The narrative is split between the airman, Stuart, and Beth’s stepson, with the former narrating the investigation alongside Beth during the 1960s. Beth’s Stepson acts as the second narrator, following his experience of the Siege of Malta through the 1940s. More than anything, this story is about the bonds people form through pain and fear and how complicated the love and relationships that arise from these shared experiences can be: ‘Could you not have left them a letter, huh? Just a word or two?’

The Absent Therapist

The Absent Therapist is a collection of narratives which defies straightforward definitions.  It is composed of numerous fragments, with no singular story or plotline. Threads are returned to, picked up and re-spun, before being laid down again and the process repeated.  This cyclical returning and exploration of numerous threads deposits the reader into the various perspectives displayed, engaging them in an honest portrayal of humanity: ‘Separate gates are a good idea, because ferrets tend to want to escape as a group.’

The Mission House

Carys Davies is a novelist and writer of short stories with an impressive array of accolades. I approached her latest novel The Mission House with curiosity and found myself completely immersed in the wistful, gently paced narrative. That is not to say that the novel is lacking; Davies weaves the plot in a temporal structure that comfortably outpaces the reader, and while the lyricism and imagery in the tightly pruned chapters project a magical aura of India, the allegory is a backdrop of post-colonialism and modern political rumblings which hang in the air like humidity; not quite visible yet distinctly discomforting.

For Now: An Interview with Meaghan Delahunt

Meaghan Delahunt, a small sunburst of a person, meets me on a cold mid-March morning in Edinburgh with a smile and a joke about elbow-bumping, softly deflecting the viral threat of a handshake or hug as only an avid reader of that day’s online news would know to do. On the train and in the Read More

Baby

There is something almost unbearable in the experience of reading Annaleese Jochems’s debut novel, yet at the same time Baby is utterly arresting, oozing with sex and tension in a sickly-sweet package. Nothing embodies this concept more than Jochems’s protagonist, Cynthia. At first, she appears to be a sheltered, childishly naive young woman. Nevertheless, Cynthia Read More

West

Carys Davies has been honing her short form craft for many years, with two collections of short stories to her name and a slew of impressive writing credits that include the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize. It should be no surprise then that her Read More

Beast

Pale with a title etched in a sombre serif on the spine, Beast lies waiting for you. The front cover features only the blood-red outline of a man lying on, or perhaps falling through empty space; the back says, in that same copperplate font: “Come to a place like this… and you will understand soon Read More

Dirt Road

Dirt Road, James Kelman’s latest novel, opens at the outset of a journey; Murdo, a sixteen-year-old accordionist, and his father, Tom, are travelling from Scotland to visit relatives in Alabama. Where one might expect feelings of excitement, the anticipation of an adventure, there is instead a solemn atmosphere. Murdo’s mother has recently passed away from Read More

The Schooldays of Jesus (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

 J.M. Coetzee  (Harville Secker, 2016); hbk, £17.99 Coetzee is canonical, curricular – you are unlikely to reach the end of an English degree without having read his Booker and Nobel prize winning novel Disgrace. Coetzee’s mature novels are dazzling, harrowing and beautifully written, in taut, elegant prose that never turns away from the sorrowful, traumatic Read More

Serious Sweet (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape, 2016); hbk. £17.99 Dundee-born A.L. Kennedy needs no introduction, being extensively published in fiction, no slouch in non-fiction, and a respected commentator in various media. She sidelines as an acerbic stand-up comedian; all these abilities and honed forms of observation feed  Serious Sweet. At the time of reviewing, this book has Read More