The New York Times obituary for George Whitmore, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1989 aged just forty-three, tells of a principled and poignant life. The author of three novels and three plays, Whitmore was a conscientious objector who spent the Vietnam War working at Planned Parenthood. He also advocated for low-income housing, covered the […]
The Mozhaisk Road, the latest novel by the scholar Lesley Chamberlain, opens in Moscow in the winter of 1978. A 26-year-old woman, Gels, arrives from England wearing unsuitably high-heeled boots. Besotted with Russian literature and keen to shed her wealthy background, Gels hopes that spending time in a communist country will reveal ‘what I want […]
Lauren Rothery’s debut novel, Television, unfolds in short chapters that switch between three characters’ perspectives. Verity is a fading 49-year-old film star who spends his days acting in awful blockbusters and going on drinking sprees. Helen, his on-and-off lover for over twenty years, reminisces about their relationship and her lifelong attempt to become a successful […]
The novella The Girl with the Golden Eyes is part of Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Its backdrop is Paris in the early 19th century, which emerges as a corrupt, decaying place whose motive forces are ‘gold and pleasure’. The scene-setting occupies almost thirty pages, during which time Balzac doesn’t even hint at the […]
Bodies pile up fast in Philippa Gregory’s latest Tudor romp, both in the bedroom and on the scaffold. The Boleyn Traitor, like The Other Boleyn Girl and The Constant Princess before it, follows a court transfixed by two things: who is sleeping with Henry VIII and who might lose their head as a result. Our […]
The Cité of Divine Power, a neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince, has been ruled by gangsters since before the earthquake of 2010 – for as long as Cécé has lived there. She knows little about the world outside the Cité and doesn’t much care. At twenty, her life is dominated by the clients she has started ‘entertaining’ […]
Bruce Holsinger’s fifth novel, Culpability, opens with a family car journey going horribly wrong. The Cassidy-Shaws have been caught up in a lethal collision and an AI-powered driving system seems to be to blame. Yet while ostensibly an investigation into the ethics of autonomous vehicles and AI, Culpability is at its core a story about […]
On finishing Harriet Armstrong’s novel, I turned to the author’s bio to confirm a suspicion: that this impressive debut had been written by someone born in the 21st century. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies describes a year in the life of an unnamed student in her last year at university and her romantically charged […]
The twenty-five stories in Hungarian writer Agota Kristóf’s I Don’t Care are extremely short, but are no less powerful for their brevity. They range from parables to anecdotes; each one is a precisely crafted window into a character’s psyche or a magic-tinted world. Across the collection, Kristóf’s spare, matter-of-fact writing – beautifully translated by Chris […]
Abigail Bergstrom’s bold, intense second novel opens with a miscarriage. The scene is raw and the reader is immersed. It ends with a devastating question: ‘hadn’t this been what she’d wanted?’ ‘She’ is Ines, the youngest of the Wyn sisters. The siblings are reunited when Ines returns to Wales with her childhood sweetheart following her […]
Giulia Caminito’s The Bitter Water of the Lake is a claustrophobic novel. Gaia, its narrator, begins life in a house that measures five metres by four. Her mother, Antonia, clears the courtyard of syringes, battles Rome’s obstructive housing authorities and makes an off-the-books deal for a flat in a lakeside town. Here the family has […]
Just before Christmas Day in 1983, Andrev, the narrator of Bloody Awful in Different Ways, learns his dad is not his dad. Over the course of the next seven years, Andrev will live with a succession of seven stepfathers, each bearing heavy psychological baggage. He nicknames them all. The first, known as ‘The Plant Magician’, […]
San Francisco is drowning. After seven years of rain, its streets have become rivers, its infrastructure is decaying and most people have abandoned the city. Among those who remain is Bo, a forty-year-old artist who has struggled to create since losing her mother in the floods and now works as a caregiver for the elderly. […]
It is often said that if you follow someone, watch their streams and comment on their posts, you’re a fan, no matter how much you profess to hate them. This idea runs like a thread through Hot Girls with Balls, Benedict Nguyễn’s glossy satire that follows two internet-famous Asian-American trans women who play for rival […]
It begins, promisingly, in a balmy Harvard dorm, where Anna should really be revising for her exams. Christoph is handsome. He plays the piano; he talks philosophy. He is German, though, and Anna’s two roommates, both Jewish, are upset. ‘Of course it’s not his fault,’ says one. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about […]
Sofka Zinovieff’s third novel, Stealing Dad, explores ‘the madness of grief’ through the eyes of seven siblings. Due to the multiple marriages and reckless sexual adventures of their infamous artist father, Alekos Skyloyiannis, they grew up separated by geography; his sudden death has brought them all together for the first time. When his widow, Heather, […]
Sarah Dunant’s latest work of historical fiction, The Marchesa, centres on the life of Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua (1474–1539). Isabella married Francesco Gonzaga, the marchese, at the age of fifteen, and became one of Renaissance Italy’s leading cultural and political figures. A letter-writer and a collector of beautiful objects, she governed Mantua during her […]
First published in 1953, Lili is Crying is about the fractious relationship between Charlotte and her daughter, Lili. Charlotte runs a boarding house in Provence and dotes on Lili to the point of domination. In the beginning, Lili falls in love with a character referred to only as ‘the young man’. He wants to be […]
In the Book of Judges, the people of Gilead identify their Ephraimite enemies on the banks of the Jordan by demanding they say ‘shibboleth’, the Hebrew word for ‘stream’. If the captive says ‘sibboleth’ (the outsider’s pronunciation), they are killed. In Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s debut novel Shibboleth, we follow Edward, an outsider incredulous to have […]
In The Book of Guilt, New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey conjures a vivid and atmospheric alternative version of Britain in the 1970s. Those who came of age in the era of Spirographs and Stickle Bricks will recognise aspects of this brilliant novel’s world. The three main characters – narrator Vincent and his triplet brothers, William […]
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The latest volume of T S Eliot’s letters, covering 1942–44, reveals a constant stream of correspondence. By contrast, his poetic output was negligible.
Robert Crawford ponders if Eliot the poet was beginning to be left behind.
Robert Crawford - Advice to Poets
Robert Crawford: Advice to Poets - The Letters of T S Eliot, Volume 10: 1942–1944 by Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden (edd)
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What a treat to see CLODIA @Lit_Review this holiday!
"[Boin] has succeeded in embedding Clodia in a much less hostile environment than the one in which she found herself in Ciceronian Rome. She emerges as intelligent, lively, decisive and strong-willed.”
Daisy Dunn - O, Lesbia!
Daisy Dunn: O, Lesbia! - Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic by Douglas Boin
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‘A fascinating mixture of travelogue, micro-history and personal reflection.’
Read the review of @Civil_War_Spain’s Travels Through the Spanish Civil War in @Lit_Review👇
John Foot - Grave Matters
John Foot: Grave Matters - Travels Through the Spanish Civil War by Nick Lloyd; El Generalísimo: Franco – Power...
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