Suzi Feay
Strange Connections
When it comes to family life and modern technology, the bizarre can run hand in hand with the mundane, especially if the family in question is rich. Take the Los Angeles house in ‘Hello Everybody’, one of the stories in A M Homes’s new collection. In a peculiar space called ‘the dent’ (I had to read the description twice to understand its configuration) there is an entertainment system that responds to a sensor worn by each member of the family. When Cheryl’s mother walks through the dent, ‘the channel on the television changes, the background music shifts, the lighting dims, Carole King begins to sing’. When she’s five feet away, ‘a quiet mechanical voice, like a small frog, says, “Revert, revert”’ and everything returns to the previous setting.
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
'The identification of a mighty force sparkling intermittently seems to me to constitute the finest and most consistent poetic achievement of Goudie’s book.'
Candia McWilliam on @lachlangoudie's 'The Story of Scottish Art'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-that-glisters
Though 'the hotel had a reputation as the area’s best, its staff were not used to looking after world leaders, so the arrival of Cuba’s new strongman, Fidel Castro, came as something of a shock.'
@dcsandbrook on @simonhallwriter's 'Ten Days in Harlem'.
http://ow.ly/I63850Bvs10
'After all, who knows what anybody is really like, or what they really think? The biographer – same as a painter of portraits – cannot help but reproduce himself to some degree.'
From the archive: Beryl Bainbridge talks to Sebastian Shakespeare.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/sebastian-shakespeare-talks-to-beryl-bainbridge