Epistolary novels were once all the rage, from the epic Clarissa to the lurid fun of Dracula. They don’t come along very often now, perhaps because they can be tricky to do... Read more »
When Lauren Elkin was a child, she took lessons with a voice teacher in Northport, Long Island, who would get her to perform in front of a mirror. Singing songs from the Italian... Read more »
‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance,... Read more »
There’s a common greeting in the Outer Hebrides: the lineage-establishing “Who do you belong to?” By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in... Read more »
Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,... Read more »
The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed (Gollancz, £22)On a gigantic spaceship halfway through its 400-year voyage to a new world, hundreds of Earth colonists are kept in frozen stasis by... Read more »
It is 1483 and 10-year-old John Collan is living on a farm outside Oxford with his father, Will, and waging war on an aggressive goat that keeps trampling him. His mother is... Read more »
Solace House by Will Maclean review – immensely fun gothic horror with a psychedelic twist | Fiction
“Man,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the first time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, perhaps, is a self-deprecating wink in a... Read more »
Without meaning any disrespect to the now defunct noughties R&B trio Mis-Teeq, one would be hard pressed to think of many novels that open with an epigraph from their oeuvre. “You know... Read more »