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Featured image of For Now: An Interview with Meaghan Delahunt

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

Featured image of Baby

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

Featured image of West

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

Featured image of Beast

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

Featured image of Dirt Road

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

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

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

Featured image of Serious Sweet (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

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

Featured image of The King

The King

The Persian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah was an opponent of the regimes of both the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini, ultimately fleeing to the Netherlands as a political refugee in 1988. He has a degree in Physics, was Writer in Residence at Leiden University in 2006, and has written a large number of novels. The King (“De Read More

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