American Rust
By Brenda Stones This debut novel comes loaded with accolades; already the book covers and the author’s websites are stashed with tributes: the next Steinbeck,…
review of literature
In Search of a Masterpiece: An Art Lover’s Guide to Great Britain and Ireland
By Nicky Charlish Books do furnish a room. They also furnish impressions, and not always positive ones. The title of this one summons up the…
Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond the Solar System
By Richard Swan From the time the human species developed eyes, we have stared up at the skies and speculated about the stars and the…
Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, by Rob Lyons
By Jason Smith ‘Fish and chips are indigestible, expensive and unwholesome’. Eating them causes secondary poverty, which arises from the incompetent and immoral misapplication of…
A History of the World Since 9/11, by Dominic Streatfeild
By Patrick West Anti-Americanism has not always been the preserve of the liberal-left in Britain. In the UK, for instance, a not-uncommon response among conservatives…
Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth
By Nicky Charlish Every crime writer sets his or her fictional detective some challenges to face. With this book, she sets herself one, too: how…
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, by Pankaj Mishra
By Sam Burt The 21st century will be Asia’s century, but it won’t necessarily be an Asian century; this seems to be the take-home message…
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk
By Jake Hollis Heard of Chuck Palahniuk? He wrote the novel Fight Club, more popularly known through the film it inspired, starring Brad Pitt and…
When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation
By Luke Gittos The upcoming general election will see the political class fighting for the attention of voters who appear to have given up on…
The Education of a British-Protected Child, by Chinua Achebe
By Jo Caird 2008 was the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, the book that is widely regarded as the first African…
3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch
By Austin Williams The agonising and ultimately redemptive tale of the trapped Chilean miners captured the world’s hearts and headlines. At the time of writing,…
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
By Wes Brown Martin Amis burst onto the seventies literary circuit, an ‘enfant terrible’, only twenty-four and yet apparently fully-formed—The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies…
Ilustrado, by Miguel Syjuco
By Mike Jakeman Ilustrado, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the debut novel by a young Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco, begins with…
Angel Time: The Songs Of The Seraphim, by Anne Rice
By Alicia Rudd From its initial façade, the latest novel by international best-selling author Anne Rice carries the attractive promise of being a ‘dark gothic…
And This is True
By Chris Sims ‘Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true,’ writes Proust in Remembrance of Things Past.…
Romeo and Juliet, Rose Theatre, London
By Miriam Gillinson A white mist unfurls onstage. Two armies filter forward—it is hard to make them out through the fog—and begin to mime a…
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
By Angelica Michelis The final part of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy starts exactly where the second volume has finished: Lisbeth Salander, the plucky and unusual heroine…
The Bible Now, by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky
By Dolan Cummings In The Bible Now, Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky seek to bring the insights of their academic field, critical Bible scholarship,…
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid
I am a great fan of Mohsin Hamid. The Reluctant Fundamentalist caught the post-9/11 zeitgeist like no other novel, and his debut book, Moth Smoke,…
Blitz as Seen in BLITZ: Fashioning ’80s Style, by lain R Webb
By Nicky Charlish What do faith and fashion have in common? At first glance, nothing. One is concerned with unchanging verities, the other with the…
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