“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…

Eliza Clark made a real splash with her debut novel ‘Boy Parts’, a cellar-dark comedy that explored ideas around sexuality and gender roles. Her second book is another firecracker, this time set in the fictional town of Crow-on-Sea – a seaside resort on t…

Susan Finlay is described as “an artist who writes poetry and fiction”, but don’t let that put you off, as The Lives of the Artists is a hugely compulsive memoir that riffs on some of the professional and personal episodes from her life, “I’ve always been…

Anything That Moves? As in having sex with anything that moves. And although the author’s note warns off his own family, “If we are related, please, for the love of God, do not read this book”, there’s no reason why the warning shouldn’t be extended to th…

ESG are one of those NYC no-wave post-punk bands who I heard on John Peel sometime in the early 1980s and never forgot, and until Universal Sound released an ESG compilation, A South Bronx Story, an obscure band not represented in my record collection. Ob…

As a confirmed city dweller, I’m quite often overwhelmed in the countryside. Overwhelmed in parts of Devon where huge hedges and foliage blot out the modern world, to the extent that Tess Durbeyfield might appear in the next field. Or in a thicket of tree…

The debut novel from Katie Bishop is split over two time lines. In the past, 17-year-old Rachel spends her time travelling with a friend. They land on an idyllic Greek island and decide to stay, mainly because an older man, Alistair, starts to show an int…

If you’re familiar with the work of Raphael Bob-Waksberg, it’s probably the critically acclaimed show Bojack Horseman, an animated comedy-drama about a has-been sitcom actor who struggles with depression and alcoholism. Oh, and the actor is a horse. The m…

Cast your mind back, if you will, to those grim days of the first lockdown. While we were all distracting ourselves baking dodgy sourdough, doing star jumps along with Joe Wicks and gaping aghast at Joe Exotic et al on Netflix, Ellie Cooper was having arg…

Luna is a smart trans woman, living in New York: great friends; a chef roommate. When she is unexpectedly fired, she has money worries. And that is the only reason she starts a fake relationship with the French heir to culinary royalty. Jean-Pierre needs …

Africa is made up of 54 countries, so the term “African music” is an obvious misnomer. The continent is home to a myriad of distinct musical genres, one of which is Kuduro which came out of Luanda – the capital of Angola – in the late 1980s and early 1990…

Sometimes three hundred words or so isn’t enough, I mean where do you start with a memoir (anti-memoir) which references everything from the healing power of walking/climbing in The Peak District to ‘the zen of the Weird’. Tbh, I knew I was going to be on…

I know almost nothing about the film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and what I do know seems to have come to me via some kind of osmosis - maybe just possessing copies of City Limits and Time Out during their heyday was enough to give me the odd fading…

Is there really a need for yet another book about Factory records? Well, yes, there is, because as one of the interviewees in I Thought I Heard You Speak says, “The women running Factory didn’t get the credit they deserved. They didn’t get any credit for …

The Mass-Observation project was set up in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life. Hundreds of people maintained diaries, replied to questionnaires, or anonymously jotted down people’s conversations and behaviour. In Claire McGlasson’s excellent sec…

A raw and slightly terrifying portrayal of new motherhood, The Nursery charts the first week of a new-born’s life from inside a suffocating New York City apartment. While there are so many things we avoid talking about when it comes to birth and parenting…

Hannah Hoare's debut novel takes you to a dystopian future where both science and religion are equally distrusted. Seventeen-year-old Katrina arrives in California hoping to finally find her people. Raised on the Island by her father and brother, she has …

“I’ve tried several times to understand why Father McMahon left the Real Life in England – of potatoes and sleek roads and nine degrees Celsius – for this shithole.” That’s fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza, and “the shithole” he’s referring to is Nigeria, wh…

How can you survive the loss of a loved one? How can you reconcile your love with the complex relationship you had? And how can you hold onto your identity now that they’re gone? We all experience grief at one point or another, and if that time has alread…

Okay - here’s one obvious example (and there are many) just after David Bowie died, I was frustrated I couldn’t seem to find any music writing that gave another (less male) view of Bowie and brought a different perspective to the men only hagiography fest…

You don’t necessarily want to become immersed in the tight-knit, hard scrabble world of Lisa Pike’s stories but you can’t help yourself. The women narrators pulling you in despite your best efforts to shield yourself from the kind of stuff you’d rather no…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a book called ‘Collected Works’ was, well, someone’s entire oeuvre, especially a book as hefty as this – honestly, it’s big enough to knock a horse out. But ‘Collected Works’ is actually Lydia Sandgren’s astonishing deb…

Sarah Penner scored a big success with her debut novel ‘The Lost Apothecary’, a rollicking tale of vengeance set partly in the hidden depths of eighteenth-century London. The follow-up – a stand-alone work – is set in 1873 with the action kicking off in P…

When I saw ‘My Body’ on the display table of a bookshop, I’m not proud of my immediate reaction. Great, I thought, this beautiful model has written a novel about why catering to the male gaze is feminist after all. My assumption of this woman’s thoughts a…

It’s easy to forget that two years ago, most of us would have done absolutely anything to be out in the world — it’s something I try to remember as I avoid sharing oxygen with fifty people on the tube. Ana Kinsella’s debut is a love letter to city life, p…

Marra is the youngest daughter of the Queen of a small Kingdom. Her older sister was married to the Prince of the neighbouring country to prevent war. When Marra realises the Prince is more monster, she also discovers being a Princess does not necessarily…

I prefer a short story that doesn’t have a trick in the tail, a point, some final boom-tish (boom-tosh) and wends its way somewhere interesting, delivering an emotional punch without the clunky use of smoke and mirrors. Luckily the clear-eyed and elegant …

Since publishing ‘The Man on the Street’ back in 2020, local author Trevor Wood has lit up the thriller scene. That book went on to nab the coveted CWA New Blood Dagger, as well as the CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Novel of the Year gong. It was also shortli…

There is something about Richard Cabut’s Disorderly Magic & Other Disturbances that transported the long coat back to London in the early eighties, wandering, walking, dreaming and, more prosaically, praying for delivery of the Thursday morning dole chequ…

The people of the Islets, a long-forgotten roaming Edenic archipelago, need help so an agent of the Nation, Hester Heller, is sent out by her abusive controller to investigate. Under the cover of a tour with her band she’s able to visit cities and intervi…

Mark A. Radcliffe’s Three Gifts is a life affirming pleasure much like his first two novels, the Not the Booker Prize long-listed Gabriel’s Angel (published by Blue Moose in 2010) and Stranger Than Kindness (2013). Thankfully the intervening years don’t s…

Nicole Flattery first hovered onto my radar when her debut short story collection ‘Show Them A Good Time’ came out back in 2020. A caustically funny and irreverent series of tales, full of sharply drawn characters, it was a calling card that announced an …

Occasionally I’ll read a book so universal that I recommend it to pretty much anyone who will listen. ‘Educated’ is a memoir that I’ve bought over and over as a present for people in my life because Westover’s story is one that everyone needs to read. Rai…

“Picture that weird and wonderful transition from night to day. Simultaneously slow and sudden. The orphic moment where the early morning resembles the dusk. The way dew-dropped spiderwebs hang undisturbed under the shade of snapdragon pods. The little tr…

Henry Kimball was once a teacher. Then a cop. He’s now a private detective. When an ex-pupil of his comes into his office one day, she tells him she strongly suspects that her husband has been cheating on her with someone he works with, but wants confirma…

During the miserable winter months, I think it’s natural to be jealous of animals that hibernate. Why can’t we cosy ourselves away, ignore work and escape the cold weather for a few months? Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel follows a woman who does just tha…

Blake Morrison’s memoirs have a habit of grabbing you by the throat and not letting go. His latest, Two Sisters, is as compulsive as And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, but its grip is just that bit tighter and despe…

I dunno, I might be wrong, but I think I saw Clio Barnard, Sam Shepard and Ryan Bingham watching over me when I started writing the review of this book. Well, maybe I didn’t, but there’s elements of all these equine greats in this novel, based on transcri…

“Most of the world believes, and has always believed, in some sort of divine being or beings, whether that’s a single, omniscient God, or many gods in complicated pantheons, or localized nature deities. But the number of people who had grown up believing …

US author Lisa Unger has won a big following among fans of twisty psychological novels (her ‘In the Blood’ won the prestigious Silver Falchion Award for Best Crime Thriller in 2015). Her latest is a standalone work and it fits neatly into the sub-genre: C…

To say I love The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s first novel which is not to be confused with the Russian classic by Dostoevsky, would be a huge understatement. The story of Selin, a young Turkish-American woman starting at Harvard, fell into my hands the summer a…