Gillian Slovo
A Voice Unchained
There’s a passage in André Brink’s latest, Booker longlisted novel that summons back his 1982 A Chain of Voices. The similarities between the two were already evident: both books are set in the dying days of slavery and both explore the violent interactions between master and slave. But the connection is directly drawn when the new book’s namesake, the knitting slave Philida, is taken by her master to see the desiccated skull of a former slave, Galant, whose 1825 rebellion is the subject of A Chain of Voices.
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
I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.