Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – the crucible of his struggle
The fifth and penultimate volume in the Norwegian author’s My Struggle cycle feels like epicentre of a thoroughly absorbing seriesA section divider, roughly a third of the way through Some Rain Must...
View ArticleFirst Love by Gwendoline Riley review – a compelling tale of toxic love
Riley’s novel about a poisonous partnership makes uncomfortable reading, but it’s also bleakly, blackly funnyBorrowing the title of one of Turgenev’s best-known works is a bold statement, directly...
View ArticleAutumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review
In his first of four seasonal reflections, Karl Ove Knausgaard drifts through autumn, still treading a fine line between the banal and the beautifully unpredictableAt the beginning of A Death in the...
View Article'I had a ghost touch me – horrible!' Writers visit haunted houses
To celebrate Halloween, Sarah Perry, Jeanette Winterson, Mark Haddon and other writers put a new spin on the traditional ghost story with tales set in English Heritage propertiesIn my adolescence,...
View ArticleRIP smoking, a lethal pastime. But strangely, some of us will mourn it |...
Public Health England believes smoking will be ‘eradicated’ by 2030. Not everybody will be celebratingCigarettes are a biker-capped Marlon Brando, Berlin-era David Bowie, Winona Ryder bomb-blasted at...
View ArticleDoggerland by Ben Smith – review
A boy investigates his father’s death in this skilful debut novel set on a vast coastal wind farmFor a landmass subsumed by the North Sea some 8,000 years ago, Doggerland, the area that once connected...
View ArticleAuthors, like Oscar winners, should keep their acknowledgements short |...
Why do writers whose prose is clean and clear turn into gushing Kate Winslets in the thank-you pages of their books?The title story of If I Loved You, I would Tell You This, Robin Black's debut...
View ArticleReasons to be cheerful about literature in translation
And Other Stories is an imaginative new publishing initiative using reading groups to choose what it will publishOptimism is a rare bird in the literary habitat; an endangered species. So when Colm...
View ArticleAs well as World Book Night, let's have a Local Bookshop Year
Whether or not you support this week's grand giveaway, you should be backing your local indie, tooIn the space of a few days, two news stories – one pumped out through the usual literary sources (Book...
View ArticleBox Set Club: Our Friends in the North
In the first of a series rewatching and reconsidering our favourite boxsets, we revisit the epic drama charting the demise of old LabourRevisiting anything 15 years after you fell in love with it,...
View ArticleBrooklyn book festival's independent example
With its spotlight on small publishers and booksellers, could the success of this New York event be reproduced in the UK?St Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn seats a comfortable 900...
View ArticleThe Costa short story prize is not enough
We are overdue a high-profile award for this neglected form, but we need more than a token, niche gong for a single storyThe news that the Costa prize is to give an award to the short story came...
View ArticleStuart Evers' top 10 homes in literature
From Miss Havisham's decaying domicile to Jekyll and Hyde's shared space, fictional homes are as varied as their inhabitantsIdeas of home are nebulous, ranging from "where the heart is", to the...
View ArticleA Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review
The second part in Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel sequence My Struggle is as invented and real as life itselfSince the original Norwegian publication of the first volume of his My Struggle sequence of...
View ArticleWreaking by James Scudamore – review
James Scudamore's unnerving third novel, centring on a former psychiatric hospital, unravels its secrets with invention and skillIn his essay on the writer and teacher John Gardner, Raymond Carver...
View ArticleLion Heart by Justin Cartwright – review
Justin Cartwright's latest is both playful and perplexingJustin Cartwright's 15th novel opens with a pair of epigrams, one the definition of fiction from the OED; the other a typically ruminative quote...
View ArticleThunderstruck review – Elizabeth McCracken's unforgettable stories
The nine tales of lost and lonely souls in McCracken's second collection coalesce into something breathtakingThe title story of Elizabeth McCracken's second collection of short fiction, Thunderstruck,...
View ArticleBoyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – the third book in the series...
The six-part My Struggle series continues Knausgaard’s exploration of the frustrations and pleasures of growing up, but his latest volume marks a departure in styleWhatever your knowledge of Karl Ove...
View ArticleUp Against the Night by Justin Cartwright review – brilliant but frustrating
Justin Cartwright’s novel is curiously lifeless until a revelatory change of narratorIn his review of a previous Justin Cartwright novel, 2002’s White Lightning, DJ Taylor noted: “It is a desperately...
View ArticleSome Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – the crucible of his struggle
The fifth and penultimate volume in the Norwegian author’s My Struggle cycle feels like epicentre of a thoroughly absorbing seriesA section divider, roughly a third of the way through Some Rain Must...
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