It is a story that is devastating because its married protagonists, Pauline and Michael, make misery their quotidian experience.
Continue Reading The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
...
In our society alcohol is socially acceptable, but if you had to take heroin in order to have sex, people would see that as toxic. Continue Reading Blacking ...
When re-imaging a room and thinking of a complete re-design there are many influences that you can seek inspiration from. Default ideas for children’s rooms are obviously characters from film ...
Of course you know Dr Zhivago: this year marks 50 years since the film’s release. Admirable thought it may be, says Geoffrey Heptonstall, the film cannot touch the book. ...
Struggling against a city in financial decline and still reeling from the wounds of civil unrest, the Turner siblings are faced with a dilemma. The family home their parents worked ...
Growing up in a stifling upper class family in rural Lancashire, Leonora was born a rebel. A source of endless frustration to industrial magnate Harold Carrington, the father she both ...
It’s been a great few years for the UK: we’ve just hosted the Olympics successfully; saw Andy Murray win Wimbledon; our TV shows have taken over US airwaves, with shows ...
Lazy Gramophone must be commended here for assembling in Time an anthology that at least attempts to marry shrewd accessibility with artsy conceptual considerations. Continue Reading Book Review: ...
The Syllabus of Errors by Ashley Stokes is an intelligent, melancholy short story collection that could have benefited from more tonal variety. Nonetheless, the stories that are here are first-rate. ...
The level of ambition along with the sheer number of characters in Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic could drive the reader straight to frantically sketching family trees, but where many multi-generational novels ...
For book-lovers everywhere, Latitude Festival in Henham Park, Suffolk, offers the most comprehensive of all literary events in the world. We take a look at the must-see performers and shows. ...
And the Mountains Echoed is a worthy and emotional successor from the author of A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner whilst managing to be even more emotionally heart-wrenching. ...
Johnson’s choice to make his characters speak in a casual vernacular, using American slang and speech patterns, makes this ambitious story easy to speed through and easy to enjoy; as ...
A raucous and engaging opening in Marjorie Celona’s debut novel, Y, gives way to moments of ordinary imagery and characterisation that, ultimately, suggests better things are to come. ...
The way that online identity is changing our real world relationships is much discussed in the press but thus far has seen relatively little literary exploration. Andrew Blackman’s new novel ...
Equal parts thrilling romp and grim, unflinching inspection of the contemporary immigrant experience, Albert Enrique’s short story collection Hypothermia is literature at its bravest. Continue Reading Book Review: ...
KS Silkwood’s King of the Jungle is an acerbic, energetic polemic of a novel, that revels in the hilarity and dilettantism of London’s art scene. Continue Reading Book ...
For our Transgression theme, Thomas Chadwick revisits a Russian classic in which the laws constraining man can be broken, as long as you consider yourself extraordinary. First published in 1866, ...
Within Sabine Gruber’s Roman Elegy Lochlan Bloom enjoys not only the sensations of life in the Italian capital but also the wonderful depiction of tensions that have existed between Germany ...
Idiopathy‘s hilarious prose, which is at turns terse and sharp and sprawling and circular, is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace at his most entrancing. Continue Reading Book Review: ...
