Paddy Crewe’s second novel, True Love, follows the nascent relationship of a young couple in the north of England. Bookish Keely is reeling from the death of her brother and turns to drink after her father abandons her. Finn is an outsider who just about survives an adolescence of relentless bullying thanks to his discovery […]
A jigsaw of somnial narratives, Goodnight Tokyo offers a bewitching nocturnal portrait of a mysterious, eerie and surreal Tokyo. Atsuhiro Yoshida’s book consists of a series of short stories, each one commencing after 1am, that lace together the lives of several characters. All of them are searching for something elusive within peculiar and otherworldly spaces, […]
The Coin tells the story of a wealthy Palestinian woman living in Brooklyn and teaching poor black boys in Manhattan who spirals into a breakdown caused in part by OCD. She has very few possessions and wears exclusively designer clothes. She carries her trust fund allowance in cash. She’s preoccupied with sex as an idea […]
Anyone familiar with the work of Patrick Modiano will know that Paris, birthplace of the flâneur and the situationist alike, is a city in which memory manifests topographically. Lauren Elkin’s first novel, Scaffolding, is alert to the ghosts that move among us. The Parisian landscape, the buildings within it and the material objects accumulated by […]
In many ways, The Road to the Country is the novel Chigozie Obioma has been steadily heading towards. Utilising fable and prophecy – prominent across his earlier novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) – Obioma depicts one of the darkest moments in Nigerian history, the Biafran War. The novel, narrated by […]
The short stories in Andrzej Tichý’s Purity are set primarily among the underclass of Sweden. A character in the collection’s first story struggles to narrate his family’s experiences in Poland after the war. He compares these to an optical illusion in which dots disappear each time you try to focus on them. They can only […]
Peter Bradshaw is best known as the film critic of The Guardian and this is certainly the short-story collection of a cinephile. Observe a simile in ‘Palm to Palm’, recounting a date that turns into a failed chiromancy session: ‘His memory of his mother, which for decades had been a soft blur, like Super-8 footage […]
The Hearing Test is narrated by Eliza, a young artist and composer living alone in New York, who partially loses, then regains, her hearing. These are also the circumstances in which it was written. Eliza Barry Callahan’s first book could be read as a memoir, a meditation on loss, art, sexuality and silence, or a […]
Saraid de Silva’s masterful debut opens with three life-changing events in the lives of Josephina, her daughter, Sithara, and her granddaughter, Annie. The novel follows the Fernando family from 1951 to 1984 to 2018, and from Singapore to Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia and England. It’s a tale of secrets and fractures and absences, and […]
Téa Obreht’s third novel, The Morningside, is set in the near future on a half-abandoned island beset by floods and food scarcity. The narrator, the eleven-year-old Sil, works as the maintenance officer of a labyrinthine apartment building while trying to follow the inexplicable rules set by her mother: never speaking in her native tongue; not […]
What happens when a parent and a child begin to see each other as real people? That is the question at the heart of Jo Hamya’s acerbic novel The Hypocrite, which follows Sophia, a playwright and a child of divorce, and her nameless father, an Amis-esque, womanising writer who spends his days ‘getting to grips […]
Reading Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart is like being cornered by a bore at a party. The narrator, Sajjan, tells you he’s a writer from Chesterfield, reminds you three or four times that the pandemic stopped us all from seeing each other, then begins a long story about a family friend who was cancelled after […]
Simone Weil’s aphorism ‘every separation is a link’ opens Keiran Goddard’s second novel. Weil explains this apparent paradox through the analogy of two prisoners knocking on the wall between their cells: it simultaneously divides and allows communication. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning pitches this idea into matters of class, following five working-class friends who […]
Broke, lonely and taking some ‘time out’, the unnamed narrator of The Lodgers moves back to the small English town where she grew up. Nothing about her sublet appeals: it has a ‘triangular shape’ like a sandwich box, and there’s a distinct aroma of men and ‘instant noodles’. She’s chosen it because it overlooks her […]
You can become somebody else quite easily if you don’t agonise over it. At the start of Miranda Pountney’s debut novel, Dylan is a 37-year-old Brit leading a high-flying life as an advertising executive in New York. Twenty pages later and ‘with no real forethought’, she’s chucked in the job, given up her apartment and […]
Overeducated and under-stimulated, Hera, twenty-four, finally admits that it is time, after three arts degrees, to leave education and get a job. Despite her determination to dress it up as research, an experiment to see if she can blend in without being recognised as ‘a chaotic fleshbag in a navy dress’, work turns out to […]
Come and Get It is the second novel by Kiley Reid, author of the zeitgeisty 2019 bestseller Such a Fun Age. Like her debut, the book portrays two sides of a transactional relationship: Millie is a young, black resident assistant at the University of Arkansas and Agatha is a visiting professor looking for book ideas. […]
‘It is falling on all creation,’ Eoghan Smith writes at the start of A Mind of Winter. ‘On the roof of the Lawlor cottage, and on the narrow track that leads through the garden … it is falling on the bare overhang of the ash and horse chestnut trees.’ Finally, the blizzard falls on the […]
The poet Andrew McMillan’s debut novel, Pity, is set in his hometown of Barnsley and is concerned with the plight of former mining towns like it. Such places are rarely mentioned in the media unless it is ‘for tragic or violent reasons’, we are told in one of the ‘fieldnotes’, passages of sociological research that […]
In Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime, a coastal city is ravaged by toxic algae and an accompanying ‘red wind’, creating an ecological wasteland. An epidemic soon takes root among the population as well. Through the chaos, a nameless protagonist gradually extricates herself from three relationships – with her mother, her ex-husband, Max, and Mauro, her foster […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm