"Grief feels like love. Sometimes you press on that tender spot, because it’s as close as you can get to the person who is otherwise gone.” – Kate Brody
Posts tagged "interview"
Rijula Das: The constant smallness of being

Rijula Das: The constant smallness of being

Set in Calcutta’s notorious red-light district Sonagachi, Rijula Das’s debut Small Deaths resists lazy stereotypes. Years of research have provided Das with an intimate understanding of the power dynamics at play between the madams, pimps and police, and how their often-cruel manoeuvrings have devastating consequences for the endless stream of girls and young women trafficked...
Amanda Lees: Her secret service

Amanda Lees: Her secret service

MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the virtues of dedication, service and sacrifice in the wake of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The internet is flooded with photos of her in her youth. The ones of her in uniform training to become a driver and mechanic during the Second World War are as inspirational today...
Ambreen Razia: Mums and daughters

Ambreen Razia: Mums and daughters

Ambreen Razia’s remarkable new play Favour at the Bush Theatre, co-directed by Róisín McBrinn of Clean Break and Sophie Dillon Moniram, plots the troubled return to family life of single mum Aleena (Avita Jay) after a spell in prison. While she was away, her teenage daughter Leila (Ashna Rabheru) was in the care of her...
Ned Beauman: Intelligent life

Ned Beauman: Intelligent life

Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is a dazzling satire of a near-future Europe in which global warming-led species decline has become accepted as an unfortunate by-product of economic growth. A system of ‘extinction credits’ means that any company set to gain financially from operations that happen to wipe out an endangered species simply has to purchase...
David Heska Wanbli Weiden: See everything

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: See everything

The rolling hills of South Dakota’s vast Lakota tribal lands provide a stunning backdrop for David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s explosive debut novel Winter Counts. The opening scene is uncompromisingly violent. Virgil Wounded Horse is a vigilante for hire. Delivering justice for crime victims with his fists, he earns one hundred dollars for every injury he...
Alex North: An intriguing game

Alex North: An intriguing game

It was just a silly game to start with. Paul never dreamed that Charlie would take it so far. Never thought it would end in murder… Twenty years later, Paul is trying to put his past behind him. But now his mother is dying, and he can’t run any longer. But home isn’t just full...
Mark Edwards: Proverbial needle, proverbial haystack

Mark Edwards: Proverbial needle, proverbial haystack

In No Place to Run’s opening sequence, Francesca Gilbert is seventy-five years old, mourning the recent loss of a husband, and six hundred miles into her train journey home. Dawn is breaking across a clearing in a Northern California forest when Francesca sees a young woman with “vivid auburn hair” being chased by a man....
Chloe Lane: To any lengths

Chloe Lane: To any lengths

Twenty-six-year-old Erin Moore has just been dumped by her gallery-owner boss after his wife discovered them in a compromising clinch in a store cupboard. She heads north from Auckland to spend the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend at the old family farmstead, where her mother Helen, terminally ill with motor neurone disease, is being cared for...
Ellen Hawley: Hard-earned love

Ellen Hawley: Hard-earned love

As any art director, editor or marketer would insist, a book should always be judged by its cover. What made Other People Manage so pickupable for me, was the immediate association with books by Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Suzanne Berne… you get the picture. Physically, and thematically, this book resembles those other rather...
Stage dive

Stage dive

“The troubadour’s spirit is to not chase anything. You simply go about your business and wait for the world to spin slowly on its axis until eventually it comes back around and finds you – still there, waiting patiently,” writes journalist Nick Duerden in his new book Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop...
Caryl Lewis: Storms and wonders and cultures on the edge

Caryl Lewis: Storms and wonders and cultures on the edge

Sister and brother Nefyn and Joseph, both in their mid-twenties, have lived alone in an isolated cottage on a clifftop on the coast of West Wales for a decade since their fisherman father was lost in a sea storm. Nefyn has a close affinity to the workings of the tides, and over time has built...
Lara Williams: Lost at sea

Lara Williams: Lost at sea

Lara Williams’ second novel The Odyssey is a biting satire about a generation cast adrift by the gig economy. Its narrator Ingrid joined the crew of a luxury cruise ship to flee from a failed marriage, and is buffeted between ever-changing roles within a mind-numbing micro-economy which sees her faking it as anything from a...