Claire Fuller is fascinated by corpses: by the moment when a supple, beloved body turns into inert, heavy matter. In her masterful 2021 Costa winner Unsettled Ground, adult twins veer between pathos and gawky... Read more »
‘I remember growing up and smelling lanolin everywhere and the wisps of wool just floating around,” debut novelist Marcia Hutchinson has said of her home city of Bradford, then a traditional Yorkshire... Read more »
The opening section of I Want You to Be Happy is an excellently droll and surefooted description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over... Read more »
There is a particular kind of British cruelty that thrives on politeness. The 2018 Windrush scandal exposed this in full: rather than chaos or spectacle, it revealed a machinery of clinical decisions... Read more »
It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose... Read more »
First-time fiction writer Ingrid Horrocks has won New Zealand’s richest literary prize for her debut short story collection, All Her Lives. The Wellington-based poet, essayist and memoirist won the prestigious NZ$65,000 (A$53,000,... Read more »
‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance,... Read more »
A countdown of the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide, 100-81. Come back tomorrow to see the next novels that made the list... Read more »
There’s a common greeting in the Outer Hebrides: the lineage-establishing “Who do you belong to?” By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in... Read more »