Piers Paul Read
A Cursory Repentance
Charles Parnell Cassidy is the corrupt political boss of the Labour Party in New South Wales – the kind of boozing, whoring Irish cliché to be found in many novels set in the larger cities of the English-speaking world. Luckily he dies in London on page 21 and we are left only with the adventures of his son-in-law, a lawyer, Martin Gregory, who had been Cassidy’s protégé before eloping to England with his daughter.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings