What do you do about a modern-day Gauguin, also named Paul, whose friends are middle aged enablers adept at talking in riddles or not revealing anything at all? Can our twenty-one-year-old hero, Frances, who’s already had problems with one middle aged gas…

To describe Single Bald Female as a book about cancer would be a big understatement. Single Bald Female is a love letter to women living with breast cancer, to loving friends trying to adapt to the everchanging seasons of their friendship, to those that a…

Yeah, the nineties seemed to pass me by in a whirl of booze, drugs and dancefloors. Paid for by work in retail, where the ace of the midweek day off was always in the back pocket just in case a Tuesday night got out of hand. Little did I know that over th…

When I was at polytechnic in the early eighties someone from the rugby club came up to me and said, “The trouble with you lot is that you sit around with your dyed hair, debating who’s more Marxist than who, thinking you’re the real people”. Well, he was …

Jacob Kerr’s first novel is set in Northalbion (a kind of mythical version of Northumberland) and it’s the first in a mooted series of folk-horror stories. It’s the early 1960s and a family – consisting of a mother and father, and their three children – m…

Ah, 2018. We thought we had problems, didn’t we? In fairness, we did: Trump was in the White House, Brexit was in constant negotiation and the inane culture wars we hear about constantly were already being ‘fought’ in tabloids and on Twitter feeds across …

Diary of a Void is a Japanese novel that follows Shibata – the only woman in her office at a boring corporate job – as she fakes a pregnancy to get out of the additional tasks pushed on her by her male colleagues. Chaos ensues, and by chaos, I mean that s…

Kate Atkinson has firmly established herself as one of the most popular novelists in the UK and with little wonder. She nabbed the Costa Book of the Year with her debut novel ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, and her crime thrillers (featuring former det…

The children of Somewhere attend their prestigious Academy. Somewhere is perfect. The Academy has a garden with golden statues celebrating its best and brightest pupils. They are the pupils who have travelled to Somewhere Else, seeking knowledge that will…

Our Struggle: A book I’ve been waiting for. A kind of shadow political history of Britain since the early eighties told through the life of ‘Tall Paul’, (the kind of person you may have looked up to at University or Polytechnic who was just that bit older…

There’ll never be a great book written about the Covid lockdown. That was the line spouted by some of the middle-class literati possibly because they couldn’t imagine writing anything about their big houses and gardens without coming across as, you know, …

Anthony Marra’s second novel is a sweeping epic that concerns Maria Lagana, a young woman who, along with her mother, flees Mussolini’s Italy and winds up in Los Angeles. Maria subsequently lands a job with Mercury Pictures, a film studio that is a severa…

In Lizzy Stewart’s new comic book (or graphic novel, if you will) nothing outrageous happens. There are no murders, no wars, no alien invasions. What we do get is the story of someone’s life – the titular Alison – born at the back end of the 1950s in slee…

Gamble's series of essays especially rings true for me, as a young woman with a chronic illness, my own path has many similarities. While this initially drew me to the book, Gamble's dissections of different elements of how fourth wave feminism converges …

Audrey Hepburn looks coquettishly over her shoulder. The legend next to her says: “Breakfast at J.D. Wetherspoon”. The speech bubble coming out of her mouth reads: “Pint!” A few pages on Karen Carpenter croons: “Why do birds suddenly appear, every time yo…

One of the greatest tennis players the world has ever seen was a woman few now even talk about. Suzanne Lenglen was her name and her story is told in a new comic book: ‘Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis’. It is said that such was Suzanne Lenglen’s p…

Packing as much into a day as most people pack into a year this is a grab bag selection of pre social media stories and snapshots of a life from the kind of author and underground legend who has sadly become extinct. There will be no more writers like Coo…

Grace is ping ponging between the north and ‘that London’ confused about sex, class and her place in the world. Psychoanalysis just seems to add to the confusion, and when drink and drugs are in plentiful supply and take the edge off all the navel gazing,…

This anthology of short stories features Robin Hood in a space western, Beowulf fighting Nazis, and Gilgamesh at the top of the leader board in an online game. The retellings span myths and legends from different countries and cultures, each with the auth…

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was a Venetian painter who was around in the 18th century. He is sometimes described as the last of the great Old Masters. In James Cahill’s debut novel, Professor Don Lamb – who teaches art history at Cambridge – is an expert on…

Taki Soma is a HUGO nominated comic book artist, writer and colourist who has worked on projects such as ‘Rapture’ and ‘Sinergy’. ‘Sleeping While Standing’ meanwhile is her first purely autobiographical work, in which she takes us through her early childh…

The Giant Dark tells the story of Aida, a rockstar with a cultish fanbase, and Ehsan, her first love. Beginning nearly ten years after they split up, they reunite at a party in London and try to rekindle the love they had in their twenties. The perspectiv…

Like every other twenty-something literature graduate, I loved Everything I Know About Love, so I was excited to read Ghosts. Unfortunately, it was a case where everything Alderton’s debut novel does, her memoir did better. The protagonist, Nina, is a thi…

In his third novel, Liam Bell ably traverses two time lines: Malta in 1941 and both the UK and Malta twenty years later. 1941 focuses on the childhood of Joe, whose father is a Maltese man who has joined the British Navy. 1961 features Beth, the nurse who…

Cosey Fanni Tutti is one of the UK’s most boundary mangling artists and sonic adventurers and in ‘Re-Sisters’, her new book, she examines her own life in relation to two other female pioneers: Delia Derbyshire and Margery Kempe. I already knew something o…

The ‘trouble’ with David Peace’s terrific Tokyo Trilogy is that you’re grabbed by the throat and flung into the centre of numerous murky goings on that nearly but never quite make it to the kind of pat, self-satisfied resolutions other crime books provide…

In Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (and superbly translated by Frances Riddle), Elena, a mother with severe Parkinson’s disease, investigates her daughter’s ‘suicide’, but was it suicide or was it murder? Elena ‘knows’ it’s murder because who can know a da…

Kristen Ghodsee’s ‘Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women’ is a new book that argues the most radical feminists were also communists. The folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song for her. Charlie Chaplin knelt before her. She was befr…

Sunderland’s Jessica Andrews scored a big hit with her debut novel ‘Saltwater’ (which won the Portico Prize), and ‘Milk Teeth’ shares something of the same DNA. ‘Saltwater’ was about a young woman moving away from her north-east roots to try and find hers…

While reading Benjamin Myers’ latest I was reminded of the BBC series ‘The Detectorists’. The joy of that programme was that while it featured two blokes mucking about in fields with metal detectors, it wasn’t about two blokes mucking about in fields with…

“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.” If you’ve read any of Adichie’s novels or listened to her speeches, you’ll be aware of her talent for discussing complex topics in a clear, straightforw…

In a high-end supermarket in Philadelphia, a 25-year-old African American woman is accused of kidnapping the white child she is babysitting. Emira wants to put the incident behind her, but two people will not let it go: Kelley, a man who recorded the inte…

Peep! Peep! Peeeep! I should say right from the opening whistle that I’m a big fan of women’s football so reviewing Suzanne Wrack’s superbly written A Woman’s Game (The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Women’s Football) was always going to be a pleasure. A po…

When one thinks of memoirs by actors or people in the film business one is inevitably drawn to names like David Niven, Stephen Bach or Julia Phillips. In the future, however, Minnie Driver will have to be added to that list based on Managing Expectations,…

I don’t know about you, but I’m so sick of hearing about romance. These days, we know that love isn’t all that matters, that women are more than just girlfriends and wives and that marriage isn’t everyone’s end goal. But when you’re trying to focus on you…

This highly amusing book of cartoons could be filed under the heading ‘good things that happened because of Covid-19’ (without wishing to make light of the global pandemic that horrifically impacted on millions of lives). Monologues Of Shite is very funn…

Candice Carty-Williams scored a huge hit with her debut novel ‘Queenie’, which detailed the travails of a young Black woman in London. Her second book, however, is something of a disappointment. It concerns five half-siblings who have the same father (a s…

To say this Sunderland-based poet’s work is accessible is to damn it with faint praise. For while his stuff is highly readable, it’s also imbued with the kind of imagery – and the kind of situations – that really makes you think. ‘In Zapruderian Detail’ (…

The sequel to Amy Liptrot’s acclaimed memoir The Outrun is everything you’d want it to be. (You don’t need to have read one to enjoy the other, though I’d recommend reading both.) Where The Outrun tells the story of Liptrot’s wild days, her ‘rock bottom’ …

Adam Binder hasn’t heard from his brother since he left Liberty House, the asylum Bobby had him committed to. But when Bobby's wife is possessed by some sort of spirit, even Bobby is forced to admit that maybe Adam really was seeing into the spirit world …

As racial tensions in the football team erupt, Gwendolyn Brooks is used as an example, by one of the characters in Friday Night Lights, of a great American writer who’s not a white male or Emily Dickinson. A surprising reference in such a mainstream serie…

When did I first see Midnight Cowboy? Maybe in a double bill with something similar at The Scala, King’s Cross, a suitably sleazy venue, especially in the early eighties. On the dole with just enough money for a concessionary ticket, all hunched up on one…

The music industry has always been awash with the blood and vomit from drugs, drink and risky behaviour and yet other than references to televisions and swimming pools and that unhelpful (still) walking cliche, Keith Richards, the hangover (and damage don…

I put off reading Douglas Stuart’s first novel, the Booker-prize winning ‘Shuggy Bain’, for many a month because it sounded like 400+ pages of misery. Set in 1981 in Glasgow, it tells the story of Shuggy and his many tribulations as he tries to negotiate …

In his previous three “hard” science fiction novels, Morden has taken readers to those explorable, exploitable regions of our own solar system that might just offer refuge to a humanity. Though Flight of the Aphrodite references those earlier books, it’s …

A spin on the classic haunted house story, Tell Me I’m Worthless paints a bone-chilling picture of fascism in Britain. The novel follows two former best friends: Alice, a trans woman who sells ‘sissy porn’ to make ends meet, and Ila, a half Asian, half Je…

Newcastle poet Rowan McCabe has made something of a name for himself over the last few years as the world’s first door-to-door poet. This venture saw him knocking on stranger’s doors to ask what was important to them. He then took himself off to his garre…

Mortimer Blackley, assistant editor at the small publishing company ‘The House Of Marvellous Books’ has taken it upon himself to keep a log of what may be the final days of the business. This epistolary novel features his daily musings, along with his rec…

This book might be on your radar, if not for its critical acclaim, then maybe because it’s set in the Toon. A beautiful, well-off Geordie girl scouts average-looking men to model for her artwork. To say I enjoyed Boy Parts would be partially untrue — Irin…

There are echoes of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel but, grotesqueries aside, Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad is a much stranger and disturbing beast. In a poisoned new world of rotting apartment blocks and disused bui…

There’s something about schools and bullying which is irresistible to novelists, and who can blame them because the scars, literal and metaphorical, run deep. Most of us have been there, running the gauntlet between lessons or waiting, on edge, for the fi…

Karen Joy Fowler scored a huge worldwide hit with ‘We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves’, a family drama with an audacious mid-story twist. Her long-awaited new novel is even better. It’s another family drama (cum saga), this time set in the US in the m…

Anita Kelly's full-length debut is the perfect tonic to the dystopian world we find ourselves in. As politicians work to invalidate so many identities, this queer romance is not just wanted, it’s needed. Dahlia and London are both competing in the competi…

Anita Kelly's full-length debut is the perfect tonic to the dystopian world we find ourselves in. As politicians work to invalidate so many identities, this queer romance is not just wanted, it’s needed. Dahlia and London are both competing in the competi…