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 »
The stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how... Read more »
The title of Colm Tóibín’s new story collection seems to promise, at first glance, a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; a reconnection with earlier work. But... Read more »
Kiran Desai The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny When we emptied my father’s flat after his death, a crowd descended. They rushed away the cupboards and chairs, his shirts and socks. Ragpickers... Read more »
Andrew Michael Hurley The Summer People by Shirley Jackson I read this years ago and it’s a story that’s truly haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from... 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 »
When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the summer of 1960, it seemed to have sprung from nowhere, like an Alabamian Athena: a perfectly formed novel from an unknown southern writer without... Read more »