Jake Kerridge
Florence Calling
In Alex Preston’s novels the vast, impersonal forces of history tend not to get much of a look-in: his interest is in showing us the human factor in the great disasters of our times. This Bleeding City, the debut in 2010 with which this bond-trader-turned-author made his name, skewered and dissected the City wide boys who were ultimately responsible for the recent financial unpleasantness. In Love and War, his third novel, sheds some light on the causes of the Second World War by asking what might have made certain intelligent English people of the 1930s become fascists.
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
Only the Summer double issue (July/August) of @Lit_Review Lots of great summer reading.
'Like many a subsequent empire, Rome had a highly ambivalent relationship with the outsiders it needed to fuel its commerce, stock its slave markets and man its armies.'
@PParkerAuthor on the rise and fall of Alaric the Goth.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-barbarian-at-the-gate @douglasboin
'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hull-revisited