Book news, reviews and recommendations
The first instalment of April’s preview begins with two I’ve already read. Divided into three parts, Ben Lerner’s Transcription follows an unnamed narrator who knocks his phone into a filled washbasin while preparing to interview his mentor, the father of Max, his best friend. Setting off fretfully to Thomas’s house, he finds him disconcertingly altered.
Books to Look Out For in April 2026: Part One Read More »
I dithered over Debra Curtis’s Laws of Love and Logic which sounded from the blurb as if it might be a straightforward tragic love story. There was also a worrying degree of brouhaha around it but I decided to take the plunge. Spanning three decades, beginning in the 1976, Curtis’s debut follows Lily, the elder
Laws of Love and Logic by Debra Curtis: ‘Guilt is both long and cruel’ Read More »
It’s almost longlist time for the Women’s Prize for Fiction although it hardly seems five minutes since the last one. Wednesday March 4th is the date to add your diary. Only novels written by women in English published between April 1st, 2025, and March 31st, 2026, qualify. I’ve followed the same format as previous years,
My Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 Wish List Read More »
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
Paperbacks to Look Out For in March 2026: Part Two Read More »
February’s snapshot includes a novel I’m crossing my fingers for, a short story collection from a favourite author and a well-known critic’s very personal piece art history. The novel I’m reading is Rupert Thomson’s How to Make a Bomb which begins with an academic returning from a conference, experiencing what may be a breakdown. I’ve
A Snapshot of My Reading #12 Read More »
H and I had been toying with going to Oslo or Helsinki for this year’s chilly break but decided to plump for Copenhagen instead which we’d visited twice before in February and enjoyed. A lucky choice as temperatures sank to -10 C in Helsinki last week. I had my eye on the Design Museum for
Four Days in Copenhagen and One Book Read More »
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
Paperbacks to Look Out For in March 2026: Part One Read More »
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
Books to Look Out For in March 2026: Part Two Read More »
Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list,
Six Degrees of Separation – Flashlight to Dreamland Read More »
This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. Susan Minot’s prose is characterised by the kind of quietly restrained precision which has long been my favourite
Blasts from the Past: Evening by Susan Minot (1999) Read More »
I went back and forth on whether to read Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, partly the cover, partly the emphasis on humour, but I read a few reviews one of which emphatically told ditherers like me to get on with it. Cash’s novel follows the supremely dysfunctional Flynn family shortly after Catherine, frustrated with her life
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash: An enjoyable romp Read More »