Sophia Watson
In The What?
From its opening sentences Susanna Moore’s new novel alerts the reader to its possibilities:
I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake.
But Cornelius was having trouble with irony. For a cop book, which at its basest level this is, that is pretty good. This is where Moore shines. Her heroine is a faintly prissy-looking, bespectacled thirty-four-year-old English teacher who is writing a monograph on Portuguese words in Rhode Island slang. An unlikely heroine for an erotic thriller. Usually the word ‘erotic’ in the blurb means there are some dirty bits which someone else’s grandmother might dislike; in this case, ‘erotic’ means verging on the pornographic, but pornography with a point. It is her heroine’s growing sexual obsession with a caricature Irish cop which leads her into disaster.
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
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2