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 »
After Daisy Fancourt’s daughter Daphne was born prematurely, she was confined to an incubator, fighting for her life against a series of infections. Unable to touch her baby or even properly enter... 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 »
Cork Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was once the longest building in Ireland: a monster of 19th-century gothic, much added to before its closure in the 1990s, that stares from... 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 »
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as... Read more »
Honey by Imani Thompson (Borough, £16.99)Thompson’s smart and incisive debut centres on Yrsa, a young Black woman studying for a sociology PhD and teaching undergraduates at Cambridge. Irritated by her solipsistic, over-privileged... Read more »