Paul Bailey
Get Carver
At first glance, Bill Beverly’s Dodgers would appear to be a crime novel about highly organised drug peddling in a run-down area of Los Angeles called The Boxes. There’s a police raid on a crack den in the opening pages in which an innocent young girl is killed in the line of fire. The reader is introduced to East (short for Easton), a solemn fifteen-year-old, employed by his uncle, Fin, a gangland boss, to act as a watcher outside the various drug houses he owns. East is held responsible for not alerting his fellow lookouts in time and receives a death threat from another member of the gang before being called into Fin’s presence.
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
How convincing is Anatol Lieven's perspective that 'if we are to prevail against climate change, we must adopt a Chinese perspective and concentrate on the long term', building a form of 'nationalist siege state'?
@malloch_brown weighs up the arguments.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/red-white-green
'She must pretend to be a walking companion, observe without being noticed and paint the subject from memory, in secret. It's a superb metaphor for the female artist, hidden from history.'
@nclarke14 ponders the resonance of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portraits-of-ladies
'And there in the evening the bride and the gamekeeper
Wait with their faces averted, wait
For the signal to shift and the lamp to glow red
And a train to arrive, but not yet and not yet.'
'It Says Here', from Sean O'Brien's upcoming collection.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/it-says-here