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…
Celia Dale died on New Year’s Eve 2011, just a couple of weeks shy of her 100th birthday. Her first published novel was ‘The Least of These’ in 1944, which detailed the experiences of an “ordinary” family living through The Blitz. Her last published novel…
C. Pam Zhang was long-listed for the Booker for her debut novel ‘How Much of These Hills is Gold’, but her latest left me a tad cold. Set in the near-future, a smog has spread across the globe, rendering all usual crops difficult to grow. People have had …
Five women meet in a basement support group. The twist? They’re all reimaginings of fairy tale characters. Adelmann’s first novel shows her skill with short fiction, as each woman tells a separate story. She then masterfully weaves these together with ove…
Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen won much praise for her second, award-winning novel ‘Waking Lions’, which lobbed moral obstacles in front of a doctor who gets caught up in a hit and run incident. Her latest (translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silver…
When I heard Velvet Underground’s Waiting for the Man on John Peel in 1979 it immediately became one of my favourite songs, in fact, I loved it so much that next day I went straight out to Virgin Records in Brum and bought The Story of The Velvet Undergro…
In Idra Novey’s compelling Take What You Need, we’re in an America currently being made ‘great’ again, with flags flying proudly from sea to shining sea, where kindness or any welcome to strangers is currently not on offer, the Statue of Liberty now rende…
Anne Lister, dubbed “the first modern lesbian” found fame long after her death (in 1840), when her extensive diary entries – many of which were written in code – were deciphered in the 20th century. They detail her life in West Yorkshire – and her interes…
“Wakefulness is Watchfulness.” That’s the slogan of the Sleepless, a group in the Scottish Highlands, who aim to prove that sleep is just a social construct; meant to keep us in our place; happy with our lot. Grafton, a single dad and travel guy for a rad…
Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. That was the note found by Vesta Gul, an elderly widow, as she walks her dog not too far from her lakeside cabin. At risk of being ridiculed by the police, she …
If you’ve been into a bookshop in the last month, I’d bet anything that you’ve picked up this book. Why? Because the cover is absolutely beautiful. The font? Beautiful. The illustration? Beautiful. But why am I banging on about the cover? Because I really…
Don’t let the title of Deborah Willis’ debt novel put you off, especially if you’re not a fan in particular of science fiction. Because, at heart, ‘Girlfriend On Mars’ isn’t a science fiction novel: it’s a rom-com, spiced with liberal doses of satire. The…
Though never a big favourite of ours, Lush, or the people in Lush, always seemed like ‘one of us’, the kind of people who played in bands, lived on the dole (or worked in record/book shops) and were the lifeblood of a certain kind of indie. Unfortunately,…
Oh, Cornwall! Like a microcosm of the many attractions around the world. It’s beauty and romance attracting visitors from every corner of the UK, visitors who provide much needed income to local businesses but also sully what made (and makes it) special i…
This is a fairytale retelling with a modern twist. Aeryn has had to provide for her family ever since her father's fortunes were lost to pirates when she was twenty. But between her father spending all their money in the local tavern and her older brother…
Eliza Henry-Jones is an Australian author who has won armfuls of awards for novels such as ‘In the Quiet’, ‘P is for Pearl’ and ‘How to Grow a Family Tree’. Her latest begins on the front-front with an arresting a chapter as I’ve read this year. Luda, a p…
Arrangements in Blue is a memoir by Amy Key, a woman in her forties who has lived what she views as a life devoid of romantic love. At times I found this to be an uncomfortable read, and I was uncomfortable with my discomfort as it only proves one of the …
Everyone likes a Guardian reading hooligan. And of this special breed Baxter Dury is one of my favourites. His records are the kind you put on and are immediately transported to somewhere on the Med about to smacked in the mouth by the girlfriend of the m…
The first thing I should mention is that the new edition of Richard Cabut’s Looking for a Kiss is a wonderful thing. Beautifully designed, it’s a proper bit of quality, the kind of book you’ll need to buy a coffee table for. Tbh you’d be better off accomp…
Have you ever had a friend buy you a book by an author you like and been touched by the sweet gesture, only for it to be one of the weirdest, creepiest books you’ve ever read? Unfortunately, this was my experience with The Odyssey — and no, it wasn’t weir…
Rose Wilding’s debut novel begins in arresting fashion. It’s the evening of 31st December 1999 and seven women have gathered together in the attic of a rather seedy hotel in Newcastle. Fireworks light up the sky outside, but the women are not interested i…
This anthology features four stories about the myriad roles of women: wife, mother, sister. The characters all burst from the seams of these strict confines, unable or unwilling to fit into the shapes society feels are appropriate. Katie Hale's story tell…
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