Tom Williams
Life in the Big Smoke
Will Wiles’s Plume begins with an explosion in east London that is felt by its protagonist, Jack Bick, as he sits in a Monday meeting and waits for the ripple to hit his phone. Bick is a journalist who writes profiles and an alcoholic, and the novel tracks a few days in his life as he seeks to push out a feature in order to justify his job at a failing lifestyle magazine, where he has developed a reputation for ‘latenesses, absences, missed deadlines, empty pages’.
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
According to The Spectator, 'Emily Brontë’s novel was "coarse and disagreeable". Nowadays such qualities would be enough to earn Emily and her sisters a column – Parsonage Life perhaps.'
@michaelwhite on The Spec's turbulent history.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-magazine-or-a-cocktail-party
To aefintyr and beyond… I've reviewed Stephen Taylor's wonderful Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail 1740–1840 for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/come-hell-high-water.
June is here, and so is the new issue of Literary Review.
In this month's cover article, Alexander Watson looks at revolutions in Germany and Russia, and asks why the year 1918 was such an 'extraordinary historical moment'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/aflame-with-anarchy