Hell’s Angels living in a quiet suburban street, black widow spiders in the dusty rooms of an abandoned house overlooking the Mexican border, someone with a BB gun shooting a Gila monster in the eye. The kind of random scenes from a childhood Joan Didion …

Always slightly cynical when I see a paperback smothered in hyperbolic pull quotes from publications as different as The Guardian and, spit, The Daily Mail, but Luster is as great as every reviewer says it is. The book’s protagonist aspiring painter Edie,…

There are real rock stars and then there are a whole load of corporate shills who are factory farmed into existence for one job, and one job only. Their job is to milk the consumer cash cow without doing much to either rock the system or shock said cow in…

Billions of years in the making, this story features no extra-terrestrials, no ancient underground cities and not even the odd alien pyramid. Instead science-fiction author Simon Morden puts on his “Real, Unashamed Science” hat to give us the biography of…

In today's culture where there is a fear of “saying the wrong thing”. Imani’s book helps us to do the opposite. It is a fantastic starting point for anyone who feels daunted by the discourse around identity politics and intersectionality. Each chapter tac…

Man Enough To Be Woman is the new autobiography from Jayne County, transgender punk rocker and pioneer, best known as the lead singer of Wayne County and the Electric Chairs. Growing up openly gender nonconforming in Georgia in the 60s and 70s, County’s e…

Dedalus remain one of the most interesting publishers in the UK. They established themselves in 1983 and became known for novels that explored the bizarre, the unusual and the surreal. Since then they have specialised in both European literature – in tran…

Since daylight savings came to steal our joy away in October, my main source of joy has been listening to music. When I saw the title The Importance of Music to Girls, needless to say I thought this memoir would connect with me, and it absolutely did. It …

Sarah Hall’s searing new novel is set in a world at a slight remove to our own. We know this because when a deadly new virus arrives at our shores, the Prime Minister who announces a national lockdown live on TV is a woman. We also learn that the virus in…

William Atkin’s introductory piece alone is worth the entry price. His dissection of the worst traits of travel writing along with the best traits acts as a benediction: we can read Granta 157, Should We Have Stayed at Home, in the knowledge we haven’t pa…

I don’t say this often, which tells you all you need to know about the publishing industry, but this book of London set short stories by Iphigenia Baal reminded me of some of the ‘repetitive Beat Generation’ fiction that came in the wake of Irvine Welsh’s…

I only noticed Selina Todd’s biography of Shelagh Delaney, Tastes of Honey (The making of Shelagh Delaney and a cultural revolution), was out in paperback because I’m the kind of nerdy ex bookseller who’s obsessed about such things - boxes of which I felt…

Mahmood Hussein Mattan was a much-travelled former merchant seaman from Somalia who eventually settled in Tiger Bay in the docks district of Cardiff. It was here that me met, and married, Laura Williams – a worker at the local paper factory. This was in t…

Since we found ourselves in the pandemic hellscape we’ve been through for nearly two years now, it can feel strange to revisit media that was made before the turn of the decade (where are their masks?!). But The Lonely City, Olivia Laing’s exploration of …

Talia Hibbert writes steamy, witty books with diverse casts. ‘Get a Life Chloe Brown’ is no exception. Chloe has moved out of her family home, the first task on her “get a life” list. She has suffered with fibromyalgia for the last few years. After her di…

In this bite-sized 80-page read, Sarah Perry reclaims the ‘Essex Girl’, vouching for the importance of loud, unapologetic women. Bear in mind: the term ‘Essex Girl’ is used very loosely in this book. While it’s inspiring to read about the histories of Ros…

There was a time when female pilots captured the imagination of the press – particularly during the early era of flight. Amy Johnson and her airborne ilk were regularly featured in newspapers, and on newsreels, when their daring and skill saw them break v…

I started to watch a documentary about the artist and writer Brian Catling the other day, but I was so freaked out by what I was seeing I had to turn it off. But what it had immediately reminded me of was the short stories in Scar City by Joel Lane, a wri…

In Weird Fucks you are on the road with a nameless narrator as she couples and uncouples in various countries in the sixties and seventies. It’s an uncomfortable grand tour though, as the sexual encounters are mainly the kind selfishly manipulated by the …

Halfway through this beautifully written biography I realised that what I understood about the politics of punk specifically and about music generally was almost all filtered through the philosophical lens of Malcolm McLaren. Jesus, alert the punk police …

A few years back critic and writer Suzanne Rivecca wrote a great piece for Rumpus Magazine which opened with this haymaker, “I hate it when men talk about Mary Gaitskill. I call for a permanent moratorium on men gassily discoursing on Mary Gaitskill”. Not…

Reminiscent of something Rebel Inc would have published in the 90s or Anthony Cartwright would have written a few years later, Fit is a revelation – and, yes, I’m implying that you don’t see many novels like Fit in any given year. What white middle-class …

Within this collection there are stories of abandoned guinea pigs, cyber cockroaches (hunting a group of mime artists), and a robot dog. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a genre which fits Hartley's short story collection. So much so that Hartl…

A country (probably England, or a version of it), sometime in the future. Willard and his mother live in a tent and are waiting in the Line. The Line consists of thousands, maybe millions, of people – all living in tents. The line, which people have lived…

The main image on the cover of this slim volume of short stories from Cullercoats’ IRON Press is that of your classic alien: grey, wizened, big eyes – you get the picture. But this collection uses the word ‘Aliens’ as a springboard to explore all kinds of…

In this graphic novel we are first introduced to Maggie Hill when she is ensconced in the stall of a toilet block, situated inside a university. She is trying her best to gee herself up (“Okay… Okay… You can do this.”). Maggie is an astronomer and is due …

Difficult to beat a paragraph like this: “And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-st…

When I think of Japan I think of shiny new buildings, spectacular shops overflowing with the latest consumer durables and a standard of living that befits a country with the third largest economy in the world. A generalisation Japanese politicians are alw…

Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings ranges widely and rigorously through, in Susan Sontag’s words, “the night side of life” particularly as it concerns ME/CFS, an illness, “without any known cause”. Affecting both Alice Hattrick (and her mother), rage and frust…

Electric Wizards is a superbly written book about what JR Moores calls ‘heavy music’. Not heavy metal, heavy music, which he persuasively and wittily argues includes musical artists as diverse as, for instance, Black Sabbath, Babes in Toyland, Funkadelic …

Vaguely reminiscent of some of the otherworldly sci-fi books my dad used to borrow from the local library in the 1970s, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi centres her fantastical world within a building (the House) the internal structure of which is a labyrinth of…

If Sally Rooney’s Normal People was written with Hemingway’s iceberg theory in mind, omitting as much as possible so the reader finds meaning implicitly, then Beautiful World, Where Are You is more volcano theory (if such exists) as much is made explicit.…

Look, I can’t lie, there used to be a time when the latest book by Martin Amis was bought, consumed and boosted. There then followed many bleak years when I approached anything he wrote (and even said) with caution especially during, what I call his ‘I fe…

When I heard that Michael Bracewell had written a new book it was almost like a time machine wrecked friend had suddenly reappeared and, boy, did he have a story to tell. But was this really the case, or had Michael been here all along and I’d merely turn…

My heroes in 1978 were Debbie Harry, Poison Ivy, Fay Fife, and Tina Weymouth so it wouldn’t have entered my head that it was unusual for a woman to present OGWT in 1978. And as that woman was the cooler than cool Anne Nightingale – tinted hair, smoky voic…

What struck me about Jenni Fagan’s Edinburgh based modern gothic masterpiece, Luckenbooth, among other things, is the radical intent that underlies it. Like an outsider call to arms there’s quotes a plenty stating what side of the line these characters ar…

The Hard Crowd is Rachel Kushner’s recently published collection of essays some of whose themes provide context to her three novels, and showcase her interest in among other things motorbikes, New York artists, classic muscle cars, prison reform and Itali…

Tamsin Calidas moved from London to a small island in the Scottish Hebrides and this is the memoir of the fifteen years she’s spent there. Reading the endorsement quotes/blurbs on the outside and inside of the front cover you’d be fooled into thinking it …

Joan Didion is an American journalist and writer. After winning a competition in 1956, she landed a place at Vogue and went from copywriter to feature editor over just 7 years. From there, she became the critically acclaimed author of 15 books including e…

What did you do in the great Covid pandemic, Daddy? Well, I didn’t write The Paper Lantern, Will Burns’ wonderfully written lockdown classic, that’s for sure. Like most of us the narrator of The Paper Lantern doesn’t do much. He mooches around his parent’…

Set in the 1990s, in Northumberland and Northern Ireland, The Monarch, is a potrayal of life in a heavily industrial culture, forced to reinvent itself as its once beloved industries find themselves in decline. The story gives an intimate picture of the C…

Simon R. Green is the sort of author I want to call “redoubtable”, a major player in the fantasy fiction scene since the 1990s but curiously much better known in America than in Britain. Moving from the space-opera sagas that characterised his early caree…

Impossible to categorise, this latest book from journalist/author Olivia Laing weaves together biographical studies of several notable twentieth century thinkers and activists to create an open-ended document about the body – our bodies, everybody’s bodie…

The good thing about Elena Ferrante is that she examines a relationship from every conceivable angle. Nothing is left unexamined. Sometimes this results in numerous interpretations of the way people have spoken or behaved. In Elena Ferrante’s latest, book…

To those of us who haven’t been to public school, public school seems to be an institution which well off parents send their kids to to keep them from disturbing their busy and privileged lives during term time. They also seem to be as close to the concep…

We may not need another book about the assumed dystopia we all face due to climate change. But this is a good one, and it’s good because part of what happens in the book is happening already. We can see the well-off creating their bunkers of safety in sub…

You may wonder how someone could write an entire book of “sugar is bad”, but the multitude of surprising contexts in which it is explored in Gary Taube’s The Case Against Sugar transforms a trivial teaspoon of everyday life into something much more seriou…

In his 2015 book, Prisoners of Geography, foreign affairs and international diplomacy journalist, Tim Marshall, revolutionised the way we looked at Geopolitics, associating nations’ geography with their political choices. The Power of Geography exceeds th…

McNish dedicates her latest book to “my grandmothers, who’d most likely have disowned me for most of what is written here”. Thus begins a collection of deeply personal observations in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, that come together to reflec…

It's really refreshing to see a modern story set outside of London or New York (Mcfarlane sets this story in her hometown of Nottingham). In her seventh novel, she gives you all you might want from a contemporary romance: pining over “what-could-have-been…