Memphis Barker
Lives of Others
Young Skins
By Colin Barrett
Jonathan Cape 175pp £14.99
Leaving the Sea
By Ben Marcus
Granta Books 261pp £16.99
Things to Make and Break
By May-Lan Tan
CB editions 206pp £8.99
Colin Barrett’s debut collection, which last month won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, is a triumph. We are mostly in Glanbeigh, a decrepit Irish town whose elemental properties seem to be pebble dash, dried blood, lipstick and drink. But the final scenes take pleasure in shifting the ground beneath the reader, leaving him or her with one foot in a different place.
‘Stand Your Skin’ deposits us in the company of Bat, a withdrawn young man with hair down to his backside and a face that was once stove in by a thug’s kick. He comes home after a rare night out and passes his mother (‘old dear’) on the way to
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk