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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…