First 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 ArticleWhere You Come From by Saša Stanišić review – memory in the wake of war
Past and present are in a constant state of flux in the Bosnian-German writer’s third novel – part autofiction, part Choose Your Own AdventureThe German word Herkunft can mean origin, ancestry or...
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