Anthony Cummins
Father Afield
As an account of fatherhood, David Nicholls’s new novel probably won’t receive the critical plaudits lavished upon Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, in which the Norwegian author chronicles, among other things, his attempts to write a masterpiece while knee-deep in nappies. Yet the experience of Nicholls’s protagonist, Douglas Petersen, is surely more common: leaving the house early to catch the train to work, returning late and frazzled to pitch in at home as best you can, sensing that your child is growing up without you.
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
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress