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 »
We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless... Read more »
A novel featuring a protagonist whose job is taken by AI has won the Climate fiction prize. Hum by Helen Phillips, the American writer’s third novel, is about a woman, May, who... Read more »
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 »