Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins review – messy portrait of protest subculture | Fiction

Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins review – messy portrait of protest subculture | Fiction

Rose, the protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s latest novel, has retreated from the world to live in Nothingness Flats, a cinder-block cabin in the Nevada desert. On indefinite leave from her job... Read more »
A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe review – a moving family portrait devoured in one sitting | Fiction

A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe review – a moving family portrait devoured in one sitting | Fiction

It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit... Read more »
Wash by Erica Wagner review – vivid portrait of a monumental American | Fiction

Wash by Erica Wagner review – vivid portrait of a monumental American | Fiction

Washington Augustus Roebling, or “Wash”, was the chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which, when opened to the public on 24 May 1883, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It... Read more »
Wash by Erica Wagner review – vivid portrait of a monumental American | Fiction

Cast Away by Francesca de Tores review – gripping portrait of the real-life Robinson Crusoe | Fiction

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 »
One Leg on Earth by ’Pemi Aguda review – a powerfully eerie portrait of Lagos | Fiction

One Leg on Earth by ’Pemi Aguda review – a powerfully eerie portrait of Lagos | Fiction

Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this... Read more »
Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins review – messy portrait of protest subculture | Fiction

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor review – portrait of a working-class artist in New York | Fiction

Brandon Taylor’s third novel, following the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and 2023’s The Late Americans, is full of hands. It’s set in the years after a pandemic that made many people desperate “to... Read more »
Howl by Howard Jacobson review – a tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair | Books

Howl by Howard Jacobson review – a tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair | Books

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits’ end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits... Read more »
One Leg on Earth by ’Pemi Aguda review – a powerfully eerie portrait of Lagos | Fiction

Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps review – tender portrait of a woman with a learning disability | Books

Lucy Apps’s debut novel tells the story of 19-year-old Gloria, who is living in east London with her mum in the summer of 1999. Gloria has a learning disability and is past... Read more »
Howl by Howard Jacobson review – a tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair | Books

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain review – virtuoso portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s final year | Fiction

Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then,... Read more »
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