Richard Greene
Cold Comfort
The country of Mary Lawson’s fiction lies 300 miles north of Toronto, where forests and lakes give way here and there to small towns, farms, mines and logging operations. The chief exports are professional ice-hockey players. In winter, temperatures of -40 are unremarkable, as are snowfalls of two or three feet in a single night.
Lawson never lets the reader take comfort in the beauty of such places. Her characters are never safe: a snow plough turns up corpses at the roadside; a house is devoured in a forest fire; a logging truck crushes a family car. A latecomer to fiction, she is certainly one
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
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies