Gayl Jones, The Birdcatcher, Virago – TLS
Catherine is in paradise, or Ibiza, which, with its palm trees and sunsets, makes for a pretty goodstand-in. She is in possession of a beach house, a successful art career, a caring husband, and a...
View ArticleMilan Kundera’s Laughter (Obituary) – Guardian
In December 1968 a plane carrying Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes touched down in Prague. The two authors had come to show solidarity with Czechoslovakia’s writers and to discuss the year’s...
View ArticleBuchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, Penguin – TLS
To read Buchi Emecheta’s novel, The Joys of Motherhood (published by Allison and Busby in 1979, now republished in Penguin Modern Classics), is to be reminded how much work is still to be done...
View ArticleSelby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho, Galley Beggars – Brixton Review of Books
The years assayed in Selby Wynn Schwartz’s new novel, After Sappho, between 1885 and 1928, are perhaps for women in the West some of the most remarkable in our history. Towards the end of the...
View ArticleGayl Jones, The Birdcatcher, Virago – TLS
Catherine is in paradise, or Ibiza, which is a pretty good stand-in. Her life is adorned with palm trees and sunsets, and she is in possession of a beach house, successful art career, caring husband,...
View ArticleMaggie Gee, The White Family and The Red Children, Telegram Books – Literary...
There’s a portrait of an author in The White Family (2002) – Maggie Gee’s novel about racism, written in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence murder – which is surely meant as a rebuke to the complacency...
View ArticleGraeme Macrae Burnet, Case Study. Saraband – TLS
“The tarmac of the path glistened like ink. I imagined stepping into it and slowly sinking up to my waist.” If you need any reminder that Graeme Macrae Burnet is a writer who revels in metafiction...
View ArticleNoémi Lefebvre, Poetics of Work (translated by Sophie Lewis). Les Fugitives –...
“Make it big!”, is how Sophie Lewis, the English translator of Poetics of Work, recently explained her choice of title for Noémi Lefebvre’s slim fourth novel, aware that the modesty of its offering...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men. Viking – TLS
While it may appear that British fiction is now an encompassing, multicultural affair, Nadifa Mohamed’s novels challenge this idea, rendering physical and psychological landscapes that are largely...
View ArticleOlivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Picador; Jacqueline Rose, On...
In the early 1980s, I read Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Many of the young women I knew at the time were reading the book and it was part of the reason they were turning to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Anna North, Outlawed. Bloomsbury – TLS
We may think that witches are a thing of the past but only last month Mary Beard admitted that the term was still hurled at her on Twitter, just as it has been used for centuries as an insult against...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jonathan Coe, Mr Wilder & Me. Viking – TLS
“Flawed and bonkers, but I like it” is how Jonathan Coe once described Fedora, the penultimate Billy Wilder film at the heart of his thirteenth novel, Mr Wilder & Me – an assessment that catches...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tsitsi Dangarembga, This Mournable Body. Faber; Irene Sabatini, Act of...
With the third volume of her trilogy about the life of an “ordinary” African woman, Tsitsi Dangarembga has completed one of the most penetrating accounts we have of the continent’s difficult, often...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Brixton, 1981: The Ritzy, the riots and the rest – Brixton Review of Books
There is an interview with the movie critic David Thomson in which he tells a story about being at film school, picking up other students’ off-cuts from the editing suite floor and splicing them...
View ArticleAnnie Ernaux, The Years (translated by Alison L Strayer); Happening...
In 1982 the French structuralist critic, Gärard Genette, suggested that we think about texts as palimpsests, overlaying earlier writings from which they imitate and borrow. Annie Ernaux alludes to this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nawal El Saadawi, Writing and Fighting – TLS
“If I find pen and paper, that is more dangerous than finding a gun”, an officer announced when Nawal El Saadawi was imprisoned in Al-Qanater jail in 1981 for “crimes against the state” (she had been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Female Human Animal – TLS
“I was born in the wrong century”, the London-based Mexican novelist, Chloe Aridjis declares near the beginning of Female Human Animal, Josh Appignanesi’s new low budget film, a knowing blend of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kate Atkinson, Transcription – Spectator
Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s eleventh novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie, the haunted private eye who, after the murder of his young...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nobody Knows My Name: Flann O’Brien’s Collected Letters – TLS
In September 1952 Brian O’Nolan wrote to the Secretary of Ireland’s Department of Local Government. “I PROTEST TO YOU IN THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS AGAINST THE EXCLUSION OF MY NAME”, he fulminated in...
View ArticleJeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints – TLS
The Book of Chocolate Saints – Jeet Thayil’s second novel, following his successful debut, Narcopolis – begins with a poet on the verge of flight. Francis Xavier Newton is about to abandon his wife in...
View Article
