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…

If you’re wondering what the new generation of writers will sound like, Saba Sams’ collection of short stories is an incredibly promising offering. Each story depicts the realities of life for millennial and Gen Z women, from the adventure of music festiv…

Who doesn’t love feminist retellings of ancient stories? Well, probably a lot of people. But if you worship Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller, Shit Cassandra Saw is going to scratch that itch. Unlike those novels, Shit Cassandra Saw is a collection of s…

In a developed world that celebrates the clean - and, because of Covid, more or less demands it - Come Join Our Disease celebrates the dirty. It’s a counterintuitive novel because its theme runs so doggedly counter to the washed, scrubbed and sparkle so c…

Novels about being in bands? A literary micro genre, probably because being in most bands is so bloody tedious. For every thirty-minute gig there are weeks and weeks when not much happens. Sure, there are gigs to arrange, weekly rehearsals to attend, song…

Some novels win you over with their cover, others come highly recommended by critics and friends, but Supper Club sold me on the premise alone. A secret society of women meet up to feast on insane amounts of food, do drugs and practice being unapologetic …

Nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021, Detransition, Baby is a story about three women who are brought together by an unexpected pregnancy and forced to confront their ideas of queerness and motherhood. Ames, who is mainly referred to using mal…

In a high rise on outskirts of Birmingham, Daniel Quinn has rented a flat that was used for a few scenes in his favourite film noir. He watches the videotape on repeat, searching for the answer to a puzzle he keeps us in the dark about. As Quinn describes…

I have to admit, when this book – a self-published piece of non-fiction detailing someone’s experiences working as a cycle courier for Deliveroo – landed on my desk, my heart sank. What next, I thought? My Life As A Baggage Handler at Tees-Valley Airport?…

Graeme Macrae Burnet is surely one of the best writers working in the UK today. His second novel ‘His Bloody Project’, about a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands in 1869, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, and …

If you can imagine a conflation of Hubert Selby Jr. and Shirley Jackson, you’d probably have The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez’s unsettling and stiletto sharp book of short stories. Horror, body-shock and subtle social and political commenta…

Take Ten Thousand Apologies (Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure) with a pinch of salt or, more appropriately, a line of something stronger, and revel in its well written mythologies. Questions about truth or otherwise are totally beside the point…

Rob Doyle’s Autobibliography? The kind of book you repeatedly throw across the room only to scamper after it like a dog retrieving a ball. Maddening and beguiling in equal measure, it’s about the year he spent rereading his favourite books. Fifty-two shor…

The work of Buster Keaton – who was making his masterpieces back in the 1920s – continues to enthral today. Two new books on the silent superstar come at his life and legacy from two very different angles. Buster Keaton was renowned for his incredible stu…

‘Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style’ is a new book that charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted the clothing of a privileged elite to make it their own. I’ve loved the Ivy League look ever since I became enraptured by Dexy’…

Joan Didion’s account of the year she lost her husband, John Dunne, is invaluable for anyone who has loved someone close to them. Since the world lost Didion in December, it has become even more essential. When the most common responses to bereavement are…

Jenn Shapland’s debut book – which tells the story of mid 20th century writer Carson McCullers – subverts genre conventions, blurring the lines between autobiography and memoir. Shapland beautifully entwines Carson’s story with her own, reflecting on thei…

Nat Ogle’s debut novel details the story of Corina, a young nurse who works at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospital in London. She also spends a good chunk of her time caring for her mother who has advanced breast cancer. In short: she’s got her hands full. But…

This short story collection, set in the north-east, shows how a variety of characters can live in communities where everyone thinks they know each other’s secrets. While stories like ‘Slipping the Cable’ don’t shy away from the darkness found in so many h…

Ten working class poets are represented in this anthology including Keith Armstrong, Jane Burn, Nev Clay, Lisa Matthews, Joan Johnston and Paul Summers, and, pleased to report, it’s a volume that contains little nuggets of delight on every page. In her in…

January is a tough month for a lot of people (that being said, what month hasn’t been tough recently?). If you’ve been tired, broke and frustrated, the influx of self-improvement propaganda the new year brings has the potential to irritate you even more. …

Hell’s Angels living in a quiet suburban street, black widow spiders in the dusty rooms of an abandoned house overlooking the Mexican border, someone with a BB gun shooting a Gila monster in the eye. The kind of random scenes from a childhood Joan Didion …

Always slightly cynical when I see a paperback smothered in hyperbolic pull quotes from publications as different as The Guardian and, spit, The Daily Mail, but Luster is as great as every reviewer says it is. The book’s protagonist aspiring painter Edie,…

There are real rock stars and then there are a whole load of corporate shills who are factory farmed into existence for one job, and one job only. Their job is to milk the consumer cash cow without doing much to either rock the system or shock said cow in…