Bright Burning Things is a quietly beautiful novel that delicately handles the pressures of addiction illness. Sonya, a complex and kind character, pursues a path of recovery when her role as a mother to Tommy is questioned. What follows is an intense and considered portrayal of family life, highlighting strained relationships and darkened pasts. We
Poetic, gripping, and unarguably unique, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is a novel on social media that we didn’t know we needed. Lockwood has taken a now well-worn, over-analysed aspect of modern society, and injected it with an impressive poignancy. What follows is a novel that crosses genres, stomping unapologetically through
Misery by Stephen King is a great book, actually it’s damn near masterful. It’s more than what first meets the eye; Misery is a deeply rich study of pain. It’s also on the other hand a rich craft book – odd I know, but with our main protagonist Paul Sheldon being a writer who has
I am a huge fan of Myers’ work having read many of not all of his published works and I was delighted to hear that he was releasing a short story collection with Bloomsbury Books and when I could I requested that book. Ben Myers is one of my favourite British writers, his work on
The End of the World is a Cul De Sac by Louise Kennedy is a varied short story collection, there is a remarkable gift here and there is no denying that there are flourishes of brilliance in her prose and the structure of the stories; but it’s a collection that I didn’t really get on
Set in the barren hills of the countryside, this sinister dystopian novel is a compelling read that explores the power of words. When everyday life has been thrown to the wind and an existence rooted in violence and survival takes over, The Last Good Man is a gritty look at what happens when a community
In a post-apocalyptic USA, sometime in the 25th century, the scattered remnants of humanity have formed themselves into several small communities. There is ‘The Commonwealth,’ a highly-organised and sophisticated group, who live in a Stadium on the edge of the desert, clinging to the remnants of old technology. They’re a society organised around a mission:
George Saunders, lauded for his short stories and winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, has been a teacher on the Syracuse University MFA creative writing program since 1997. This book is based on one of his Syracuse courses on Russian literature. A Swim in a Pond includes seven classic
What a book… I did help format this book but my review is based on the fabulous writing that is held within the pages and not my involvement in the project (just for transparency I wanted to mention that small fact). Girl on Fire wastes no time and throwing the reader headlong into the story,
Here’s an interesting premise for a thriller: three students are brutally attacked and lynched by a mob in the Nigerian university town of Okriki. Everybody knows who did it – the whole thing was captured on social media – but nobody knows why. Dr Philip Taiwo, a psychologist and expert on the behaviour of crowds,
