Hilary Mantel
Take One Before Bedtime
So: how does she think of them? This fat book is made up of four smaller collections, spanning nine years of writing; each story nasty, brutish and short, each displaying a pat familiarity with the baser passions, each tightly, tritely organised, and most ending in murder; most cocooned in a sort of rotten gentility, like a cadaver wrapped in a net curtain. How does she think of them, and why, like the perfect poison, do they slip down so easily?
The characters are young couples in restaurants, businessmen who entertain clients in their home, young professionals in their single-person households. When the author steps outside the middle classes, she employs a perfunctory psychological shorthand: 'his drunken savage father, his mother who'd cared only for men and having a good time,
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
'Clayton’s book may be unusual in that she avoids the British biographical tradition of combining amateur psychoanalysis with elevated gossip. But it is perfect on its own terms.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-carved-her-own-way
'Wilson’s target is less a straightforward biography than a sifting of Lawrence’s legacy for what remains urgent and alive, the aim being to shed its infernal baggage in search of an abiding paradise.'
@nemoloris on a new life of D H Lawrence.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/sex-was-a-mystery-to-him
'One of the gloomiest, most depressing and yet most gripping crime novels I have read in a long time.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews new books by @JaneCaseyAuthor, @FrankRGardner, @gregbuchanan, @AuthorSJBolton, @ajaychow, @adeleparks, @PGJonesVenice and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/may-2021-crime-round-up