Missouri Williams’s darkly absurd and wilfully grotesque debut novel, The Doloriad, concerned itself with the aftermath of a world-shattering catastrophe. Her second takes place in what feels like the beginning of one.... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryI remember reading throughout my childhood, but it’s hard to identify my earliest memory of reading. In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to... Read more »
At the Café Royal in Regent Street in 1944 three intelligence officers bent over their plates while Europe held its breath. Outside, London braced for D-day. Inside, Graham Greene announced that he... Read more »
‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,” Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the... Read more »
The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, whose novels, travel writing and translations made him a prominent literary figure in postwar Europe, has died aged 92. Publishing house De Bezige Bij said in a... Read more »
This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The... Read more »
One hundred years of a unique literary rural life will be made available to readers and researchers after the British Library acquired the archive of Ronald Blythe. The author of Akenfield, a... Read more »
For one of Victorian literature’s most distinctive voices, who was once hailed as a genius by Oscar Wilde, very little has been known about Amy Levy for more than a century. But... Read more »
As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous... Read more »