INTERVIEWS / JUNE 2022
Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet
by MARK REYNOLDS
Rosa Rankin-Gee’s widely acclaimed second novel Dreamland is a thrilling and tender portrait of a disenfranchised community in a near-future Margate ravaged by climate change and economic collapse. With the seaside town’s now-defunct amusement park as a backdrop, she deftly tackles the political and personal landscape of financial disparity, poor housing, extremism, the climate crisis and the perils of leaving social issues to the whims of the free market…
INTERVIEWS / JUNE 2022
Mark Edwards: Proverbial needle, proverbial haystack
by KARIN SALVALAGGIO
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. The woman stumbles and falls and their eyes meet briefly through the carriage window…
CONTEXTS / JUNE 2022
Unheld conversations
by ANBARA SALAM
Just before my second novel, Belladonna, was published in 2020, I gave each of my parents an advance proof copy. They had both read my first book at a much earlier stage in the publishing process, when I was still working on edits. This time, the novel was just weeks away from being made available to the public…
FAVOURITE STORIES / JUNE 2022
Grace Paley: ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’
by SEAN LUSK
I was fortunate enough to see Grace Paley speak. It was back in 2003 or thereabouts at the Small Wonder Festival at Charleston. I think it might have been the first time the festival, which celebrates the wonder of short stories (the clue’s in the title), had taken place. Grace Paley had been due to come in person, but ill health prevented her from making the journey from New York, and so Ali Smith interviewed her (brilliantly) via a video link…
JUNE 2022 / SHELF LIFE
Plain shelves and glittering prose
by WILLIAM FRIEND
William Friend’s debut novel Black Mamba is a chilling tale of hauntings, fatherhood, sexual attraction and the taboos of grief. Since his wife Pippa died suddenly nine months ago, Alfie has been struggling to look after their twin daughters. When they tell him one night there’s a man that comes to them in their room, he turns to his wife’s twin sister Julia, a psychotherapist, for help…
CONTEXTS / MAY 2022
One man’s trash
by BRETT MARIE
Pick up your average celebrity memoir and you’re almost certain to find it dressed up in one of two ways. Some stars punctuate their life stories with matt black-and-white photos, neatly arranged over chapter headings or between sections. The more sensationalist among them choose the ‘16-Page Full-Colour Insert!’ (capitals and exclamation mark mandatory), helpfully collating all the glossy proof of their exploits in one place…
MAY 2022 / TIPS FOR WRITERS
Ten commandments for happy writing
by EVE AINSWORTH
Eve Ainsworth’s debut adult novel Duckling tells the story of a young woman called Lucy (a.k.a. Duckling) who keeps herself to herself on a towering housing estate. Lucy’s daily routines are interrupted when a new neighbour asks her to look after her little girl for a couple of hours – but doesn’t come back. Suddenly responsible for someone other than herself, Lucy has to learn to let the outside world in and reconnect with her own childhood self…
APRIL 2022 / POETRY
from Border Zone
by JOHN AGARD
John Agard has been broadening the limits of British poetry for the past 40 years. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents. It’s a diverse collection in which the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy, elegiac and satirical rub shoulders with the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put – about becoming an overnight lockdown gardener – together with a frequent sprinkling of calypso poems…
APRIL 2022 / CONTEXTS / INTERVIEWS
Stage dive
by BRETT MARIE
“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 Stars. It’s a beautiful thought. But wait, that can’t be right. Can it?
APRIL 2022 / INTERVIEWS
Caryl Lewis: Storms and wonders and cultures on the edge
by MARK REYNOLDS
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 up a vast collection of specimens washed ashore into their cove – shells, egg cases, seeds and trinkets from distant lands – which she keeps on display in glass cabinets…
APRIL 2022 / INTERVIEWS
Lara Williams: Lost at sea
by MARK REYNOLDS
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 gift shop manager to a manicurist, a poolside lifeguard or a croupier…
APRIL 2022 / CONTEXTS
Have you ever met the Greeks? They bear the most vital, wondrous gifts…
by MIKA PROVATA-CARLONE
Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a very old man slept in a bare prison cell. He was not alone, however. An old friend was watching over him, reluctant to wake him up to the day that would mark the end of his life. It is a cameo of extraordinary tenderness and humanity, of the most piercing political criticism and analysis, as well as of infinite private and historical tragedy, which has (or should have) the power to still affect us deeply today…
APRIL 2022 / WRITERS’ PATHS
It started with a chair
by CHARLOTTE LEONARD
I’d been swimming in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath and was walking home along the lane, stomping colour back into my toes, when I bumped into a lifeguard friend who I hadn’t seen for a few weeks. When she isn’t at the pond, she’s usually making giant sculptures, weaving willow into stunning shapes. But not this time…
APRIL 2022 / TOP TENS
Serving up justice
by T. ORR MUNRO
An Enid Blyton Secret Seven story about a jewel thief with, in my eight-year-old eyes, the cleverest twist, marked the beginning of my lifelong fascination with crime. So it is probably no surprise that I became a Scenes of Crime Officer with the police, spent over twenty years as a police and crime journalist and now see my first crime novel about a CSI published…
APRIL 2022 / CONTEXTS / ON FILM
The train
by PAUL FISCHER
The train to Paris, which had been expected at 2:37 p.m., pulled in five minutes behind schedule.
Albert Le Prince didn’t see his younger brother, Louis, very often anymore. Louis had moved away from France over twenty years ago – and if that wasn’t enough, lately he had been consumed by his work on a mysterious moving picture machine…
APRIL 2022 / INTERVIEWS
Maggie Gee: Being human
by MARK REYNOLDS
Hot on the heels of the release of a 20th anniversary edition of her Orange Prize-shortlisted The White Family, Maggie Gee’s latest novel The Red Children is a sequel of sorts. But the sometimes stark realism of the earlier book, which was motivated by her grief, anger and shame over the murder of Stephen Lawrence, makes way for a playful near-future fable in which a wave of new migrant children in Ramsgate turn out to be exiles from a community of Neanderthals who are escaping their warming homeland…
APRIL 2022 / CONTEXTS
Frontists, Stalinist and murderers
by DANIEL HAHN
Frentista, estalinista, asesina loca. Una palabra detrás de otra, un conjunto de palabras elaboradas en una ecuación implacable. Sílabas sonoras, perfectas, que iban organizando una cadena armónica que resonaba igual que una recurrente letanía.
So begins the next chapter, and I know it’s going to cause me trouble…
APRIL 2022 / POETRY
Eve
by COLM TÓIBÍN
Colm Tóibín’s first collection of poetry Vinegar Hill, written over several decades, explores sexuality, religion and belonging through a modern lens, across themes including politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through Covid, memory, mortality and a fading past. Here he gives voice to a rueful Eve as she looks back on her life with Adam in the shadow of the Almighty…
