There is a small collection of books that nearly everyone of a certain age has read by virtue of them being on the GCSE English reading list – Of Mice ...
The follow up to 2008’s acclaimed Submarine, Joe Dunthorne’s second novel, Wild Abandon, takes as its focus a number of odd yet endearingly flawed characters practicing, in their words, “secular ...
It’s puzzling whether it is even morally justifiable to read Kurt Cobain’s journals. Publishers appeared to have marketed the book with a disturbing “suicide chic” campaign. The identity of the ...
Jane Struthers’ Red Sky at Night is a delightful compendium of countryside wisdom. Filled with fascinating facts, it covers such things as predicting the weather prediction, reading tea leaves and everything ...
Moving and bitterly sweet, The Hand That First Held Mine is Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel and winner of the 2010 Costa novel award. Exposing the fragile nature of our human ...
When the Guardian recently ran a series of podcasts celebrating the short story, Chekov, Ballard, Hemingway, Carver all predictably featured. It was Eugene McCabe’s perfectly formed Music at Annuhullan that ...
This debut novel from Wes Brown is very much of its time and place. Pervaded by Yorkshire grit, Northern realism and cinematic allusions, it is a visceral exploration of a ...
They gather on the houseboat. The water pipe makes its way around the circle of people, the drug a withdrawal from the business of life. Yet Mahfouz is explicit in ...
Say the name “Philippa Gregory” and one immediately thinks of tightly laced corsets, the corrugated lace of magnificently decorative ruffs, cunning plots and manipulative manoeuvres in the dangerous arena of ...
My short story diet this week has been An Elegy for Easterly, the debut collection by Petina Gappah, published last year and winner of the Guardian First Book Award. The ...
For the last two years, the Lazy Gramophone collective have been collaborating on this combination of writing and artwork that shares Litro’s ethos: the championing of short fiction, poetry, and ...
I promised in a blog last week to write about Mick Jackson’s collection Bears of England (from which he read at the Small Wonder short story festival) and I’ve been looking forward to ...
