The title of this fine novel is taken from a speech purportedly given by Tariq ibn Ziyad, an Umayyad commander who initiated the conquest of what is now present day Spain back in the 8th century. He burned his men’s ships in the harbour, so they couldn’t …
One would often see nerds, geeks, or in modern parlance, NPCs (non-playable characters), train-spotting or lurking around the transport or local history sections of a Waterstones. Maybe very occasionally see them on an early evening television programme f…
“Amber traced the silver lines across her groin, which marked her first severing from her daughter, the first sign of their physical distance.” Amber's faith has brought her to a new marriage and a small town - a home where she and her children can flouri…
Sometimes parents make choices that seem to make sense when looked at in one way, but in another make no sense at all. Noreen Masud’s father, for instance, locks up his family so the noise and ‘chaos’ of Lahore doesn’t damage or spoil them, without realis…
The milieu of Elizabeth O’Connor’s debut novel put me in mind of the one evoked by director Michael Powell in his 1937 film ‘The Edge of the World’. Powell’s film concerned itself with the depopulation of the Scottish archipelago of St Kilda as the younge…
1984. Reagan’s America. During a long hot summer 13-year-old Mel spends most of her time mooching around Swaffham, a small town in Massachusetts, with best friend Jules. They experiment with alcohol and weed, and share whatever second-hand knowledge they …
Guy Ware’s fifth novel takes place on an unnamed island, and brings together a cast of characters as bizarre as the belief that the Island was, in fact, created during the 1980s in what they call “The Great Simulation”. Politicians, clerics, and would-be …
In the world of ‘Salt Slow’, the debut short story collection from Julia Armfield, a young girl transforms into a praying mantis, a PhD student creates perfect men from stray body parts, and a teenager gains a wolf as a stepsister. There really aren’t any…
Guardian Angels is an organisation that looks after buildings that are currently unoccupied. They do this by placing temporary residents inside the properties in order to deter squatters and vandals etc. Marlow is a woman on their books and after a happy …
As Catherine Taylor grows up a bogeyman stalks the streets of the North, in this particular case, though, the bogeyman is real. Prosaically, not a Jason or Michael Myers, but a lorry driver from Bradford with a hatred of women - and, in some ways, maybe n…
Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a compilation of twelve essays spanning from 1968 to 2000, offering a poignant exploration of events throughout Joan Didion's life. From insightful reflections on American politics to nuanced analyses of art and literature, …
I was intrigued by Killing Thatcher (The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown) as I was intrigued by Hilary Mantel’s The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Anthony Cartwright’s How I Killed Margaret Thatcher. Killing Thatcher, however, isn’t…
It’s 2016. Ezra, a queer, Jewish person living in New York, is carrying out their last act of protest outside of Trump Tower. In their final moments, we’re given kaleidoscopic flashes of the 27 years between their birth and their ultimate decision to end …
Oftentimes, thrillers that pile up the bodies and revel in rug-pulling twists can leave me cold. They’re usually overly generic and populated by characters that, if they turned sideways, would be more or less invisible. Conversely, novels about, say sheep…
In Rita Bullwinkel’s suitably punchy debut novel, eight of the finest young female fighters in the US gather in Reno with one aim: to be crowned the next big thing in women’s boxing. Each chapter takes the form of a bout, and Bullwinkel describes the acti…
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American writer who has previously won awards for his poetry. ‘Martyr!’ is his first novel and I wouldn’t be surprised if it too scooped a gong or two. It concerns Cyrus Shams, a late 20s poet and “straight-passing” homosexual, w…
Blueberries is a collection of ‘essays concerning understanding’ that explores multiple styles from academic to short story to memoir. It kicks off with Yellow City, which tells the story of a woman who revisits Lisbon a decade after a serious sexual assa…
InkyLab Publishing are an independent publishing company based in Newcastle and the driving force behind all sort of interesting books including their latest ‘A Day in the Life’. Established in 2019, Inky Lab has provided a vital service for writers in th…
I nearly didn’t read Wifedom because a critic and writer I respect, who shall remain nameless, gave it a right old lashing. Which, having hugely enjoyed this book, casts massive doubts on her critical faculties. Sure, Wifedom (Mrs Orwell’s invisible life)…
Truman Capote’s ‘swans’ were a group of very rich and privileged women he became friends with and then proceeded to ‘betray’ in the three stories that were collected in his controversial unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. Attempting to be an expose of th…
I loved this biography of Richard Deakin which is surprising as it ticked a lot of the boxes that ‘trigger’ irritation, annoyance and a perfectly natural inclination to chuck said biography across the room. Went to Oxbridge? Tick. Likes wild swimming? Tic…
Autocrats and dictators always have a way with words and phrases that obscure and sanitise the indefensible and Mao was no different. The Great Leap Forward resulted in an estimated forty-nine million deaths (the famine resulting from it referred to in Ch…
A calculating, whip-smart 60-year-old woman named Grace meets an easily influenced young woman named Janice in Holloway Prison. Once they’re out, they cook up a plan to trick and rob old women by drugging them with sleeping pills and taking anything valua…
The only named woman in Andrew McMillan’s fine debut novel is Margaret Thatcher, and she looms large over the narrative due to her role in the 1984/85 miners’ strike. The setting is South Yorkshire and the tale flits back and forth across three generation…
Francis Spufford scored great successes with his two previous, wildly different novels: ‘Golden Hill’ (a rollicking 18th century romp set in New York) and ‘Light Perpetual’ (five children are killed during a Second World War bombing raid and the novel ima…
Abby Simpson’s The Dragon and the Butterfly follows Matilda of Flanders, wife to William the Conqueror, as she navigates court life. Great historical fiction gives you a window into a time, people or perspective you didn’t hear about in school. While the …
I’m a sucker for a good campus set novel. From the seductive pull of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ to the caustic machinations of Curtis Sittenfeld ‘Prep’, there’s just something so satisfyingly immersive about them. Maybe it’s because they’re invari…
Animal starts with our main character, Joan, watching her married ex-lover commit suicide in a restaurant. We don’t know why. She immediately moves to Los Angeles, feeling that the only possible next step for her is to meet a woman named Alice. We don’t k…
Suicide prompts shock, anger, sadness and many whys and what ifs. Not for the first time a writer has decided to inhabit the mind of a person in the last year of their life to see if the whys and what ifs can be answered (or, I guess, if not answered, suc…
In her introduction to this fascinating book Caroline Barker Bennett tells us what it isn’t: “It is not a popular ‘tales of canny Tyneside women’.” What it is, rather, is an illuminating account of women’s employment in the region from the 1930s-1980s. Th…
Mari Hannah is one of the region’s most lauded authors and she has three different strands of crime fiction to her name including the Ryan and O’Neil series (featuring a pair of Northumbria CID officers), and the Stone and Oliver series (featuring more no…
This short novella is a beautiful blend of whimsy and grief. Each sentence and each word is carefully chosen in order to make the most of this strange adventure. Keenan works for Daylight Chasers, a company that makes the nearly impossible possible. He is…
Unusually for such a doorstopper of a novel, ‘Wellness’ isn’t weighted down with a sprawling cast of characters. Instead, we largely spend our time with just two people: Elizabeth and Jack. They meet as college students in the early 1990s where they both …
A young woman waiting out the night in a diner, her sister asleep at home, undisturbed after two months, a young man playing the music he loves for a final time, a brothel manager trying to solve the mystery of who left a prostitute stripped down and brui…
“I go down to the shore in the morning/and I say oh, I am miserable/ what should I do?/ And the sea says/ Excuse me, I have work to do.” ‘I Go Down to the Shore’, the eight-line poem that opens A Thousand Mornings, is one that will make you laugh at the c…
Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s an American classic. A dangerous racist and demagogue who’s been part of American life since 1776. A man infused with the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. American presidents prepa…
Hailing from a small, independent Newcastle publisher (just the way we like ‘em) this debut novel reads as a prose-poem meditation on faerie lore clearly penned by an author whose work is informed not just by the popular re-telling of folk tales, but by t…
2021 - On holiday in Germany with his husband Sandy, Richard’s sudden impulse to take a tour of Sachsenhausen concentration camp induces an episode of the such psychic dissonance that he is transported into the life of another person in another time – n…
In Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender, the narrator grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the final page. She’s brutally honest and fighting a custody battle that’s going awry because she’s fucking women, given up her job as a lawyer and now look…
I was very much on the more, er, Redskins, Au-Pairs, Clash side of things and therefore thought that Oi! was the music of the enemy, an enemy who were stupid enough to think that young white working class men should only be interested in fucking, fighting…
In the future, two tech behemoths dominate everyone’s lives. One is Trick, a kind of amalgamation of all today’s FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google). Head honcho at Trick is Terick – a massive arsehole in the Elon Musk mould. One…
Spending the summer in a strange, dilapidated hotel run for and by disabled people is the last thing that teenager Reggie wants. What about a beachfront? Or sunshine? And why does everything have to revolve around Luke's needs (Luke – who has cerebral pal…
‘Sleepless’ by French writer Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston, is part-memoir, part-critical analysis, part-art exhibition on insomnia. Plagued by twenty years of sleeplessness following the birth of her first child, Darrieussecq explores o…
While Agatha Christie is the most famed of all Golden Age crime authors, Josephine Tey (1896-1952) can be credited with moving the genre away from clever parlour games and into more psychological arenas. Josephine Tey is also the main character in Nicola …
An unnamed narrator meets Ciaran, the most beautiful man she has ever seen, and is determined to make him love her – no matter how cruel, uncaring and in love with his ex he is. ‘Acts of Desperation’, the debut novel by Irish writer Megan Nolan, is part o…
Reviewing books can be a strange business especially when books are being reissued that I’d previously read or reviewed for The Crack Magazine many years ago. Fortunately, I love Joel Lane’s writing as much now as I did then. And not because I come from B…
The first part of Minor Detail recounts the rape and killing of a nameless young Palestinian woman by Jewish soldiers in 1949. It’s a grim, impersonal and violent episode - a war crime that could have been committed by any group of soldiers in the years s…
In Julianne Pachico’s compelling Jungle House, ‘mother’ is the AI ‘Alexa’ who runs and controls a well-off family’s second home. She’s aided by two robots, a drone, and Lena, the mysterious girl, who is the only human help. When we pick up the story the a…
Femi Kayode made a real splash with his debut novel ‘Lightseekers’, which was selected by The Times, Independent, the Guardian and plenty of other outlets as their ‘Best Crime Novel of the Month’ when it was published in 2021. It was also longlisted for t…
When Millie discovers the brutalised bodies of her Grandpa and Uncle, her life changes forever. Suddenly, her village becomes notorious, with people hungry to hear every detail and buy any item the dead men had touched. Her fellow mill workers stare, and …
While the word ‘trauma’ gets thrown around online to the point of obsoleteness, the popularity of books like The Body Keeps the Score shows how people are genuinely becoming interested in learning about PTSD. Even more misunderstood, if it’s talked about …
‘Lord Jim at Home’ was first published 50 years ago with reviewers variously labelling it “squalid and startling” and “nastily horrific”. This new edition carries a foreword by Ottessa Moshfegh – an author not averse to the squalid or the startling – who …
This novel opens with Gilda, an anxious, unemployed twenty-something, injured after a car crash. Someone asks if she’s okay, but she’s not: she’s been turning up to A&E every week with severe panic attacks because she can’t stop thinking about death. Desp…
Brolly and Gill are two obese people who love (over) eating, but they don’t describe themselves as obese or overweight, and neither do they use descriptions like ‘plus size’ or ‘body positive’. As far as they are concerned, they’re just ordinary people. W…
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