Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber, £12.99)It has been more than a decade – “long empty days / with the blank page” – since Paulin’s Love’s Bonfire. His 10th collection is informed by... Read more »
The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial... Read more »
Living is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate... Read more »
The Cambridge post-punk band Dolly Mixture were an all-girl trio who formed at school and mixed rambunctious self-penned songs such as Will He Kiss Me Tonight? and Been Teen with covers of... Read more »
Kathy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her “feel dead famous” in her community. She was raised by her older... Read more »
At the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped... Read more »
Our fears turn feral when they have nowhere to go. South Korean author Bora Chung’s new short story collection plays with old horror tropes: endless corridors and looped staircases, exits that only... Read more »
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan review – startling stories of China’s new precarity | Books
From the early 2000s until the Covid lockdowns, Hu Anyan was one of China’s vast army of internal migrants, moving between cities in pursuit of work. He did 19 jobs – shop assistant,... Read more »
When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there... Read more »