How to end a marriage
Marriages fall apart. Everyone has reasons, but no one really knows why. We got married young. Maybe that was our mistake. In New York State, you can legally get married before you can do a shot of tequila. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children...
Nina Stibbe: Out of the box
Nina Stibbe’s first book Love, Nina, a collection of letters written when she was a nanny in the 198os, was the surprise publishing hit of 2013. Andrew O’Hagan called her “The funniest new writer to arrive in years.” In Love, Nina she mentions writing a (semi-autobiographical) novel as part of her polytechnic course. After the...
Dangerous for ordinary people
It takes great determination and mettle to give voice to silence; to look at closely, and truly see what has become invisible or been reduced to transparency. Louisa Treger evinces both purpose and mettle, deep knowledge and fine understanding in The Lodger, her debut novel about the writer Dorothy Richardson, someone who is often overlooked...
Chekhov’s mongoose and the elusive orange
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) We at QI have taken the opening lines of Dickens’s shortest novel to heart. Our latest book contains nothing but facts, facts, facts: 1,411 times over. The book covers a huge range of...
Best of Enemies Vol 2: 1953–1984
The second volume of Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B.’s graphic novel history of US-Middle East relations begins in the 1950s with the Eisenhower Doctrine and ends with the fallout from the suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut. This turbulent era of US-led intervention also saw the Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War, the Iranian...
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
This major new exhibition at the British Library explores Gothic culture’s roots in British literature and celebrates 250 years since the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Alongside the manuscripts of classic novels such as Frankenstein, Dracula and Jane Eyre, Terror and Wonder brings the dark and macabre to...
From page to screen
The hype around the release of Gone Girl is a useful reminder that around half the top-grossing films of the last two decades have been literary adaptations. Bringing a well-loved book to the big screen is relatively risk-free, and this is reflected in the programme of the London Film Festival, the 58th edition of which...
The cruise of the Allegra
It was my first winter cruise. I was a waiter on the Allegra, most of the passengers well-to-do people who spent part of the winter cruising in the warm waters of the Pacific, from Puerto Escondido to Singapore and back, including stops in Australia and New Zealand. That winter we stopped along the South American...
Smoke and mirrors
Mira Jacob’s sumptuous debut novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a heartbreaking and hilarious story of a family in flux in the heat of a New Mexico summer. Basking in positive reviews and attention, she reveals that life as an overnight literary sensation is not always as it seems. 28 August 2014 Today is...
In two words
Michelle Haimoff’s debut novel These Days Are Ours is a witty and reflective story of a group of bright young things trying to make sense of life and love in post-9/11 New York. The action shifts when the main protagonist Hailey finds herself attracted to a man who seems like no other she has dated...
