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.

W-3: A Memoir

Bette Howland (Picador, 2021) pbk, £14.99 Originally published in 1974, this is an account by the author of the time she spent as an inpatient in a psychiatric ward of a hospital in Chicago, having taken a life-threatening overdose. It piqued the interest of Brigid Hughes, editor of Public Space magazine, who came across it Read More

The Golden Mean

The petals gleam the utter blue of the welder’s flame[.] ‘The Dockyard’ Oh, the succinct and perfect use of ‘utter’ here to convey the blueness of that flame! What better word to use? Lines such as this continue to resonate long after reading John Glenday’s fourth collection of poetry, The Golden Mean. ‘The Dockyard’ works Read More

CRUDO

Crudo, Olivia Laing’s first novel, is performance. Laing dons the mask of radical, experimentalist Kathy Acker, in a performance of experimental writing, and in text, her main character Kathy tries to resolve her commitment issues through the performance of marriage. Laing, a non-fiction writer, steps into the guise of Acker to bring a manic and Read More

SELECTION DAY

Ten years ago, a brilliant and shrewd mind emerged out of the social and political schisms of India. As if firing arrows, Aravind Adiga scribed his fictional arriviste hero’s every thought and deed in his 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, The White Tiger, with sufficient force and accuracy that its target – India – Read More

THE OUTSIDE LANDS

The Outside Lands is an evocative and sensitive exploration of the quiet turmoil of self-discovery in 1960s America; it is beautiful and painful. Death intrudes on the lives of Jeannie and Kip when their mother is killed the same week JFK is assassinated. As the nation grieves for its President, Jeannie and Kip grieve for Read More

INNOCENTS AND OTHERS

That is the thing about films. They don’t change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to Read More

LITTLE DEATHS (LONGLISTED, 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE)

“Ruth Malone is enthralling, challenging and secretive – is she really capable of murder?” – Little Deaths synopsis. The characters of a promiscuous mother and a struggling journalist are the protagonists entangled in the story of the horrifying murders of two children: Little Deaths is the debut novel from Emma Flint. From an early age, Flint Read More

The Not-Dead And The Saved (And Other Stories)

From the very start of Kate Clanchy’s The Not-Dead And The Saved (And Other Stories), we fall straight into her powerless mess of human nature responding to a power-hungry, often pessimistic world. Clanchy’s collection of short stories considers various forms of motherhood in respect to personal development. Through dimensional, flawed characters, and with notable proficiency, Read More