Reviews

What does one look for in a novel?  For me, it’s ideas and fine writing.  I gave a friend a book by John Updike once, and he said he hated being pulled out of the story to think, Oh what, a beautiful sentence this is!  But not me.  I like to wrap fine sentences around…

When world leaders are acting like that one guy in high school who took a shit in the girls locker room, it’s easy to feel disheartened.

To read Carlo Rovelli is to have your hand taken by a kindly Italian man with a soft voice and enigmatic smile, then led gently down the rabbit hole into a quantum wonderland where the only thing you can be certain of is that certainty doesn’t exist.

There are two ways to think of Swanna in Love.

Probably shouldn’t include something by a Birkbeck staffer but I’m not a student now so – fuck it.

Hill plays with form throughout the book, to great effect. Some stories are epistolic, others are poems, reports or trailing snags of small talk on the School Run. The use of experimental form compliments the overall theme and objectives of the collection, reminding us that rules and reality are flexible conditions.

There are grand, overarching themes which loom portentously over the unfolding personal narratives, omens of ecological doom and economic collapse and a depressing paucity of societal communion, all echoed by carefully detailed accounts of the city’s deterioration and stricken portraits of its unhappy denizens.

In Eva Aldea’s debut novel, Singapore is hot and humid, tense, sterile and slow. There are snakes and crabs, expat housewives with Filipina maids.

Mystery, magic, mental illness and the wrecking of important relationships are some of the elements that make Crow Face, Doll Face a success.