The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida... Read more »
‘There’s a place in Italy in need of someone. Why don’t you look into that?” Inspired by his two-year stint directing a writers’ residency, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, with these... Read more »
100 by Anthony Powell William Wood, Alberta, Canada, 68, retired art historian: “A series of novels that concerns several specific tiers of English society in the first three-quarters of the 20th century... Read more »
Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books isn’t good for the writer’s... Read more »
Rosa Rankin-Gee follows her 2021 near-future climate-crisis dystopia, Dreamland, with a similar but more politically focused work. As I read My Only Boy, I kept having to remind myself that the nation... Read more »
‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on... Read more »
= Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Picador, £16.99)Kawakami’s latest opens with a bang, as narrator Hana learns that her old friend Kimiko has been... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryI’m not sure what we were reading – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams or the poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – but I was... Read more »
The premise of Séamas O’Reilly’s brilliant debut novel is that a Hollywood actor has flown into Derry to star in a new TV series about the Troubles called Dead City, then mysteriously... Read more »