Keir Starmer can be a hard man to read. Even now, focus groups complain that they’re not quite sure what he stands for – though he has come off the fence on... Read more »
A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. “There was someone in the house.” She’s imagining it, she tells herself. But then she sees him – a man, tall, with... Read more »
Lauren Oyler is an American writer, very tall and very smart (or so I read). In 2021, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, a plotless story about a young woman not... Read more »
In Charlie Kaufman’s puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It’s as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from... Read more »
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s third novel, first published in French in 2020, is a quiet, meditative story of shared endeavour. Though gentle, its emotional complexity means it is Dusapin’s most accomplished work yet.... Read more »
Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the... Read more »
At one point in Fiona Williams’s accomplished debut novel, an elderly lady tells 10-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at... Read more »
Indonesia: the world’s largest island nation, 17,000 pieces of land projecting from the waves where Indian and Pacific oceans meet, ranging in scale from the giants of Sumatra, Java and Borneo, to... Read more »
Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld (formerly Marieke Lucas Rijneveld) won the International Booker prize with his debut, The Discomfort of Evening, narrated by a farmer’s daughter coaxed into sex games with her siblings... Read more »