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
'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
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings