Kathryn Hughes
Can You Drop a Kindle in the Bath?
When I was young I dreamed of one day having my own book-lined room. It wasn’t that we didn’t have books at home, but there weren’t tottering mounds of them, let alone bulging shelves. For one thing, we were thrifty users of the local library, which meant operating a strict revolving-door policy: one volume out for every one that came in. Individual books simply didn’t have time to set up home.
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'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
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish