We all know the story told in The Odyssey – if not from Homer, then likely from James Joyce, Stanley Kubrick, or the 2004 classic ‘The Spongebob Squarepants Movie’. Aeaea, the island home to the witch-goddess Circe, is just one of the stops that Odysseus …
Stephen May won much praise for his last novel ‘Sell Us The Rope’, which told the tale of Stalin’s visit to London in 1907. For ‘Green Ink’ he’s treading similar ground in that he’s blending fact and fiction to detail the curious events of 1920 when the t…
Ennui ridden millennials. Bloodless hipsters. Shallow social media conquistadors. Poor old Anna and Tom have it tough in Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection. They’re a couple of twenty somethings living their best lives in a Berlin, post soft revolution…
“Most artists can’t afford to be artists”, which inevitably leads to one of the eternal questions: how do you make art without a steady wage? How do you buy supplies, rent out a studio, pay rent and live/survive especially when the days of living on the d…
Readers of Joel Golby’s previous collection, ‘Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant’ will have little doubt over his ability to turn out sharply written, acutely observed and properly funny essays. In Four Stars, the essays are bound aroun…
The ‘problem’ with Brian Eno is that he’s much too cerebral for a lot of Brits. Many of us seem to hate the intellectual, the arty sod, the musical polymath. His musical CV is ridiculously good, but it prompts suspicion, fear, loathing and a “tear him dow…
This, the debut novel from Belgian writer Angelo Tijssens (translated by Michele Hutchison), won the jury prize at the Prix Roman Gay in France, and it has already been translated into French, German and Spanish. In short: It’s got some pedigree. It tells…
Hearing about other people’s dreams is often described as tedious. “No one wants to hear about your dreams,” you may have heard your friends, family and colleagues cry as you tell yet another long-winded tale of your nighttime adventures. Well I may be bi…
Ten years ago, Emma Healey scored a huge critical and commercial success with her debut novel ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’, which went on to become a hit BBC drama. Healey’s latest however, is a let down. It concerns Cassie who works as a keep-fit instructor in…
When journalist Lily Anolik finds an unsent letter detailing Eve Babitz’s evisceration of Joan Didion, she, once again, finds herself powerless to Eve’s call. Having aided the renaissance of Eve’s writing with her Vanity Fair profile in 2014, and chronicl…
This engrossing novel from Jessica Soffer is set in New York and features several interlude chapters in which she casts an eye over Central Park, giving us little pen portraits of its sundry couples. The novel begins: “Some people come to the Park because…
During the First World War Rob Deakin receives catastrophic wounds, and it looks like his short life is coming to an end. Lying stricken, he has a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger – a man that Rob will come to know as the Medic – and he undergo…
Nila is a 19-year-old woman living with her father in Berlin. Her mother, once a feminist revolutionary, died a few years earlier. Nila’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan before Nila was born, and Nila and her dad now live in a run down block of flats. …
Who is Julia Fox? You might know her as a model, a meme, as the ex-girlfriend of Kanye West or the lead actress from ‘Uncut Gems’. You may not have heard of her at all. But after reading this book, one thing will be clear: Julia Fox has had an unbelievabl…
Alarm bells initially rang for me on the opening page of this debut novel. A woman is having a difficult birth and three other women are witness to the scene: “Three lonely women watch this birthing in bright windows of electric light.” It then becomes ap…
A woman in her early twenties moves to New York to work at the literary agent of J.D Salinger. Despite being an English graduate and avid reader, Salinger’s work has managed to pass her by – but over the course of her time at ‘The Agency’, she learns why …
This is one of those psychological thrillers in which a whole bunch of friends agree to meet up for a weekend away only to have the collective air let out of the party balloons by a mounting catalogue of revelations. The hook this time is that the friends…
Looking back over years of friendships, encounters, jobs, moves, art, music and everything in between, the narrator in Nate Lippens’ remarkable novel Ripcord is very clear where he stands, “When I think of who are considered credible witnesses and reliabl…
Yael van der Wouden’s first novel – which was shortlisted for the Booker this year – is one of the most striking debuts I’ve read in a while. It’s set in 1961. The Netherlands. Isabel lives alone, save the attentions of a housekeeper, in the family home. …
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen is a young woman living in Massachusetts in the 1960s who works in a prison and cares – if you can call it that – for her abusive, alcoholic father. Moshfegh is a master at creating cruel and pitiful characters that you can’t hel…
‘Ghost Pains’ collects Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ acclaimed short stories in one place, bringing together works previously published in The Paris Review and Harper's. Whether road trips through the American landscape and family ghosts, or the liminal state o…
At this time of year, walk into most bookshops and you’ll be greeted with a tonne of tomes hoping to tie-up that quirky Christmas gift market: books that generally contain material that can be consumed in small chunks: toilet books. I’d usually give such …
When Abby’s mother-in-law commits suicide, it feels like something of a fresh start. Finally, her overbearing influence on Abby’s husband Ralph can be exorcised, and the two can move on from their past traumas and start a family of their own. But when Abb…
Newcastle. The modern day. Two women are at an impasse. Vivien is a property developer looking to totally revamp the run-down and crime ridden Valley Park Estate. Everyone on the estate has been relocated accept one. Binty. She’s lived in her house for de…
The Bad Politics of Good Taste. The Nation magazine’s perfect summation of Nathalie Olah’s Bad Taste. How does ‘good taste’ in the world of fashion or leisure or art, for instance, support the world of big business and capitalist fundamentalism? How has l…
For obvious reasons the only novels that made sense to me this year were novels by Palestinian writers like Adania Shibli, Selma Dabbagh and Isabella Hammad. Ibtisam Azem is another writer I’m adding to this list as her novel The Book of Disappearance (su…
Kate Atkinson takes obvious delight in creating memorable characters and she’s at it again with her latest. All the main players here are given colourful backstories, and even those with walk-on parts are skilfully sketched with a quick swish of her pen (…
This twice Booker nominated author has an enviable reputation, and his latest features a truly impressive bit of world-building. Actually, scratch that. Let’s go with: world-dismantling. It’s sometime in the future and the world has suffered catastrophic …
1927. With the coming of recorded sound, the United States is ushering in a new age of popular music. The Catchers are the men – and in Xan Brooks’ fine new novel, The Catchers are all men – tasked with travelling the country on behalf of their record com…
I don’t usually go a bundle for Science Fiction – all that nonsense about hyper-jumps and star clusters exploding beyond the moon of Xoon – but I found plenty to enjoy in this short story collection from local author Gray Rankin. As the book’s title kind…
One of the defining novels of the nineties, ‘The Beach’ is a story about a young British man’s adventure to a tropical Thai paradise that has been untouched by tourism. Written by an infuriatingly young Alex Garland, who was only twenty-six at the time, t…
It’s rare that I take an interest when a book I love gets turned into a movie – usually I don’t even watch it. But a couple of years ago, it was announced that Saoirse Ronan was going to be starring in ‘The Outrun’, and Christ was I excited. It’s an irres…
The unluckiest wannabe pop-star in the world? Not quite. Lawrence has got a back catalogue that’s well regarded and still available to purchase, he’s the subject of a very good documentary, countless articles and this book - i.e. more than enough for post…
Recognising the Stranger (On Palestine and Narrative) is an attempt by Isabella Hammad to subtly wrest the Palestine conflict away from non-fiction writers. To show how in Rashid Khalidi’s words, “Literature can be much, much more revealing than political…
The English author Celia Dale died in 2011, just shy of her 100th birthday, and during her lifetime she published thirteen novels. The first of these was ‘The Least of These’ (1943), which shone a light on a family as they lived through The Blitz. Her fin…
The United States. Maine. Charles is a white man who was raised by a white mother and a Penobscot stepfather, the Penobscot being an indigenous people native to North America. After the passing of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, in 1980, Charles, …
How do you deal with grief when the person you’re grieving is still alive? Overwhelmed by both her father’s critical injuries after a car accident and her husband’s long-term chronic illness, Melissa Broder’s latest protagonist flees to the desert to answ…
Towards the end of this fine debut, one of the characters says: “I think mamas are mostly always trying their best. It just looks different depending on the cards they are dealt and the hurt they are holding.” The cards dealt to the characters in Rachel S…
Ania Card's first novel is a “love letter to all the mistakes we make in our twenties, to friendships that feel like love”. It certainly transports you to the age where you feel like you should know who you are but still find yourself searching to truly w…
One reviewer wrote “if the Gallaghers were Scottish”, and my reply? Absolute bollocks. Certain rules forbid such rank comparisons - for more on this, check out Neil Kulkarni on Oasis. Sure, William and Jim Reid argued and fought like all brothers do but t…
Baltimore born, forged tough in the acid mania of 60s San Francisco, and dying as a seasoned New Yorker, Cookie Mueller would have been at home anywhere. Despite her rise from obscurity as a regular face in the Baltimore underground cinema scene – particu…
Foreverism by Grafton Tanner, published in 2023, is a short but powerful exploration of nostalgia and its multifaceted effects. The book analyses how contemporary culture continuously revisits and updates the past, coining the term “foreverism” to describ…
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos plots the course of a relationship as the end of East Germany looms. Hans is the kind of male character from a Milan Kundera novel: a married man who intellectualises why he can’t keep his cock in his pocket, whose wife cuts to th…
Lynne Tillman’s latest chronicles a series of one night stands and love affairs across New York, Amsterdam, London and other places in the 1960s. ‘Lost and disorientated women aimlessly drifting through life’ is a genre that makes up a decent chunk of my …
Service has three narrators: Daniel is a celebrity chef who has recently been accused of sexual assault. Julie is his wife and the mother of his two sons. Hannah is a woman who waitressed at Daniel’s restaurant while she was at university. She’s not one o…
It is no surprise that this, Laura Fish's third novel, was the ‘S I Leeds Reader's Choice Winner’ in 2022. It opens with the death of Koliwe's father, a tragedy which leads to her decision to travel to his birthplace in Eswatini, the former Kingdom of Swa…
Neoliberalism. It’s an ideology that has been pursued by just about every major party in the west – some, admittedly, with more zeal than others – since the late 1970s. And yet you never hear politicians describe themselves as staunch neoliberals: hence: …
William Boyd can turn his hand to any genre. He’s been responsible for some brilliant, Evelyn Waugh-like farces including ‘A Good Man in Africa’ and ‘Stars and Bars’. He’s also written romantic, foreign adventures such as ‘The Blue Afternoon’, and several…
The success of Rita Bullwinkel’s ‘Headshot’, released earlier this year, has promoted a quick reprint of ‘Belly Up’, her earlier short story collection. ‘Headshot’, which details the exploits of a bunch of young women who gather together to battle it out …
“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person making things, making art, I mean. Like money”. A request which leads Nicola Long to the letters of Donna Dreeman, a potter who died in the eighties, …
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson is one of the best books I have ever read, and I devoured it in no time. This utterly beautiful yet heartbreaking novel follows two young Black artists in London, both of whom remain unnamed. The story delves into the mal…
When I think of Billy Childish I also think of English outsiders like Lawrence from Felt, Denim etc, and David and Rachel from Comet Gain. People who’ve used the dole and housing benefits as a basis from which to build ‘careers’ as music makers no matter …
Jack is a 53-year-old copper working the Newcastle beat. He’s not exactly an old school dinosaur, but no one would ever accuse of him of being woke. When Jack is involved in a serious car crash, he’s sent for a routine head scan and the doctor breaks the …
Benjamin Myers’ last novel ‘Cuddy’ was a bold, mystical, millennium-hopping story about St. Cuthbert and the north – its people and its landscape – which cast one eye towards the heavens. ‘Rare Singles’ is an altogether more straightforward tale, but this…
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