Megan Hunter’s very slim novel (it’s really a novelette, but who’s counting) The End We Start From beautifully marries together a world-wide environmental collapse with the difficulties of giving birth and...
Read MoreSince We Fell is not one of Dennis Lehane’s better novels. Like all his work it’s compulsively readable, there was never a point when I didn’t want to turn the page. But it’s most certainly a novel of two...
Read MoreThere are very few writers who could pull off a short-story – let alone a novel – that features a three-storey flying bear with a rapacious appetite for human flesh. Unfortunately Jeff Vandermeer isn’t one of them....
Read MoreJames Bradley is a mate so it’s certainly possible that my thoughts about The Silent Invasion are biased. Except I know that’s not the case. I didn’t love the book because James wrote it, I loved the book...
Read MoreIt’s astonishing how much detail, plot and character development Vivek Shanbhag packs into his novella Ghachar Ghochar. Published for the first time in English and beautifully translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, the...
Read MoreWhile Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 could have done with a haircut – to the worth of 30,000 or so words – that doesn’t change the fact that it’s both enormously entertaining and has something to say. Set...
Read MoreSwimmer Among The Stars by Kanishk Tharoor is a very strong and erudite collection of short fiction. There’s a real sense of range and diversity to the stories that feature in the book. A piece recounting the final days of...
Read MoreKrissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace is a marvelous book, the sort of marvelous book that deserves the type of in-depth analysis that I don’t have time to provide. It’s a toss-up between this novel and Jane...
Read MoreWhen literary blogs and the book section of newspapers published their list of novels to look forward to in 2017, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot was listed frequently. Her previous book, The Possessed, a collection of...
Read MoreReading All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg could have been a painful process, the equivalent of having your teeth removed via your nostrils. The story of a woman in her late thirties, childless, unmarried and living in New York...
Read More
Recent Comments