The word I’ve most seen associated with Ali Smith’s Costa-award winning novel is ‘dazzling’, and it’s the word I’ve reached for most, each time more aware of how telling it ...
Blending humour, melancholy and sharp insight into complex relationships, Noam Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s collaboration is a wonderfully uplifting tale that is as beautifully shot as it is acted. ...
Pedro Almodovar’s latest offering, his “most political film yet”, is a gaudy, farcical satire on modern Spain — but does it sound much cleverer than it actually is? Bella Whittington ...
Global warming. Now, there’s a phrase that can divide opinion, stir up controversy and shine a spotlight on apathy It’s nearly impossible to discuss without resorting to well-trodden rhetorical ground ...
It was never going to be easy. A critically acclaimed novel with a complex Russian doll structure that links characters as far ranging as a nineteenth-century abolitionist and a futuristic ...
I’m a big fan of teenage narrators – I like what you can do in terms of exploring the large, adult ideas that most of us start to think about ...
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 ...
The title of Taiye Selasi’s debut short story is as blunt as it is ironic, proclaiming bold content while quietly mocking Western anthropological theses of old. I first came upon ...
It’s hard to escape the fact that by opening a book, we are accepting a beginning; and by reading its final words, we are acknowledging an end. Is it ever ...
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 ...
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 ...
A large metropolis like London or Buenos Aires cannot really be known by any of its inhabitants, unless he is forced to visit slum and palace alike in search of ...
So you want to be a writer? Picturing long, quiet days tapping away at a keyboard and sipping endless cups of tea? The odd walk in the park to clear ...
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 ...
This novel is a stylish, audacious and self-assured debut that mercilessly exposes the artistic ego and, in doing so, both ridicules and humanises it. Its wandering and plotless prose might ...
