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 ...
The process of book reviewing can sometimes seem like a production line. A new book comes out and every newspaper, magazine and website rushes to review it. But is this ...
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, ...
If I found myself in a Fahrenheit 451 world, I would be the fool running around grabbing as many books as I could until my arms were full and I ...
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 ...
Bawdy peasant girls performing a bear dance. Masked revelers spinning to the sound of a mariachi band. An accordion-playing polar bear. Collective onion-chopping commiserations to a Jazz accompaniment. The haunting ...
It is 1992 in Buenos Aires and Felipe Félix, a hacker and coke addict, is invited into the topmost room of a business tycoon’s twin tower. It is a room ...
