Book news, reviews and recommendations
March’s second paperback preview begins with one from an author I’ve long admired, now a Nobel Prize winner. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft is a tale of family and obligation set in postcolonial Zanzibar, now a tourist destination thanks to its beautiful archipelago. When his mother and stepfather take young Badar into their home, Karim is puzzled […]
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Back from Copenhagen (more of which later in the week) with March’s first paperback preview which begins with two favourites from last year: one a novella, the other a chunkster. I was so impressed with Anthony Shapland’s use of language in A Room Above a Shop, I assumed he was a poet but he turns
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Several Irish authors in this second instalment of March’s preview, including one of my favourites, but I’m kicking off with a writer I’ve not read for a while. I enjoyed John Lanchester’s Capital, soapy though it was which is perhaps why it made such good TV. Look What You Made Me Do is set in
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We’re on the home strait, heading towards spring here in the UK with some interesting fiction to ease us along although I wasn’t entirely sold on March’s first title. Quite a lot of pre-publication brouhaha around Eliana Ramage’s ambitious debut, To the Moon and Back, which follows Steph who arrives with her sister in Oklahoma
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The second part of February’s paperback preview kicks off with an unusual choice for me. Jon Hickey’s debut, Big Chief, is set on the fictional Passage Rouge Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin in the run up to a crucial election for Mitch Caddo and his best friend Tribal President Mack Beck who run the Reservation’s
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The first instalment of February’s paperback preview begins with one that slipped through my net when it was first published. Rupert Dastur’s debut, Cloudless, is set in rural Wales where in 2004 Catrin and John wait for their older son to return from Iraq, horrified at his decision to enlist. The appearance of an old
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Back from my London break (more of which later in the week) with the second instalment of February’s new fiction which kicks off with a couple I’ve already read. The first, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, follows the supremely dysfunctional Flynn family shortly after Catherine, frustrated with her life as a stay-at-home mother, unilaterally declares her
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Lots of new fiction to keep those of us in the Northern Hemisphere interested through the winter months beginning with one I’m particularly keen to read. Danish writer Helle Helle’s This Should Be Written in the Present Tense was one of my books of 2014 raising hopes for they translated by Martin Aitken, a name
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The second part of January’s paperback preview begins with two shortlisted for 2025’s Women’s Prize for fiction. In Rósín O’Donnell’s debut, Nesting, a woman flees her home with her two young daughters, convinced that’s it’s no longer safe for them to live there. Her hoped-for escape proves to be tougher than she’d thought with little
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Quite a mixed bag of paperbacks to kickstart January, beginning with one I expect to see piled up on bookshop tables. Anne Tyler’s first novella Three Days in June follows Gail whose daughter is about to be married, starting with the wedding rehearsal day which has already started badly for Gail, summoned to her boss’s
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The second part of January’s preview kicks off with one for which I’m hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Louise Welsh has followed The Second Cut, her excellent sequel to The Cutting Room, which picked up Rilke’s story two decades on, with a third instalment. The Cut Up sees Rilke deciding to
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