What are the borders between the urban and the rural? Between consumerism and conservationism? Between innocence and experience? These are some of the questions concerning Melissa Harrison’s debut novel Clay. ...
It’s London, 1850, and private detective Charles Maddox has just been given a new case. Sir Percy Shelley and his wife are being harassed by someone threatening to make public ...
The stories in this debut collection are familiar: a beautiful outcast taken in by seven dwarves, a girl with a long plait of hair, a woman going three times to ...
These formally inventive tales add up to an unflinching and visceral collection of stories which fragment and coalesce in surprising ways: Borges as written by Poppy Z Brite and Virginia ...
Meet Alex Woods. He’s seventeen years old and sitting at the wheel of Mr Peterson’s car at Dover after a hasty round trip to Zurich. A customs controller has just ...
When sixteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd gets off the train in Philadelphia at the opening of Ayana Mathis’s debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, she is amazed to find African Americans free ...
I need to start with a disclaimer: there are a lot of Dicks in this book. There are also lots of long and often obscure words. But while I’m keeping ...
It’s an exciting time for African science fiction, marked most recently by the release of StoryTime’s ‘AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers’, a short story collection edited by Zimbabwean writer ...
To mark the 50th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange, Random House have released the novel in a new form – an app. In this review, Wes Brown looks at both ...
About a year ago I read Erlend Loe’s novel, Naïve. Super. It was one of those books that came at the perfect moment in my life; a wonderfully poetic, ...
Even before I read F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I was under its spell. The book exuded magic, from the enchanting eyes floating above a sparkling fairground on the ...
A good occult story doesn’t require the reader to believe in the occult. I can be scared by Algernon Blackwood without believing in ghosts, or get a chill down my ...
Katy Darby is the author of The Unpierced Heart (originally titled The Whores’ Asylum), a historical novel featuring a home for ‘fallen women’ in 1880s Oxford. Here, she reviews ...
In David Constantine’s short story “Asylum”, a therapist asks a patient to look in a mirror and describe herself. The mirror is “a lovely thing, face-shaped and just the size ...
A recurring theme is the discovery of the city’s beauty in unexpected places. The introductory three-page comic depicting the artist’s social anxiety about being at a publishing party alone gives ...
It’s not often I get to the end of a novel and realise I need to reread it straight away. Not just because I liked it—I did—but because I realised ...
In her essay “Site of Memory” (Inventing the Truth, 1995), Toni Morrison talks about how a snippet of information—“a dimly recalled figure, the corner of a room, a voice”—is enough ...
Sometimes, it is the echo of something larger that is at the heart of a Jackie Kay short story: a distillation of sorts, whereby a brief, intense image or feeling ...
The Rachel Papers is all a bit meta; our narrator structures his life around the literary greats (“I know what it’s supposed to be like, I’ve read my Lawrence”) and ...
The Things They Carried is, essentially, a collection of related war stories. But it also redefines what a war story truly is: not a traditional hero narrative of courage, but ...
