France and the world were stunned by shock and horror at the beginning and end of 2015 when terrorist fundamentalists spread fear and murder across Paris. Hunting down the culprits, locating their networks and above all untangling and striving to understand their motives and ultimate purpose has become a daily agenda, with ramifications far beyond...
When my wife and I married fourteen years ago, our two bookcases became one. It was a lopsided union. Roxanne had cultivated her book collection for years, saving everything she read, all the way back to a desiccated hardcover anthology of Czech short stories she’d liberated from her public library in high school. I, on...
Years ago, when I was starting out as a writer, I met a literary agent. “What do you want to see happen to characters in a story?” I asked him. His reply was simple: “I want to see them changed.” In many ways, identity change is a central part of most stories. Through the experiences...
There are good reasons why an imagined world of spies and spycraft has provided an alluring backdrop for British fiction and, subsequently, British cinema and television for more than a hundred years. It is a land that is regularly visited, with a long list of explorers, from Kipling, at the very beginning of the twentieth...
Still pondering gifts for the smaller people in your life as the winter holidays loom? Here’s a selection of non-perishable treats for Discerning Young, Not Very Young and Definitely Older readers, featuring books that have been published, reissued or rediscovered in 2015, as well as one or two earlier favourites. Hamper #1 – A Box of...
On 10 December 2015, Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe was awarded the revived Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award for her remarkable debut collection Loop of Jade. Also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and in the running for the T.S. Eliot Prize to be announced...
They say that good things come in small packages, and W11 Opera’s current production of Eliza and the Swans, a sparkling retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans, is certainly a glorious thing on the small stage of the POSK Theatre in Hammersmith, which for two nights transforms into the great world of fairy...
Émile Zola thoroughly enjoyed being the bête noire of French letters and the gadfly of the literary imagination, constantly challenging what writing, novel writing in particular, was all about. He was unflinching in his project of redefining literature as an enterprise of scientific scrutiny into society’s innards and gutters. He became the leading figure of...
As 2015 draws to a close it’s time to reflect on the literary highlights of the past twelve months. I ended last year’s round-up with brief mentions of a few titles I already had my eye on, and I’m pleased to say that the vast majority of them didn’t disappoint. Edith Pearlman’s short-story collection Honeydew...
Laborde, a town three hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires in Argentina’s Côrdoba province, was founded in 1903, originally under the name Las Liebres. Populated at the time by Italian immigrants, it now has six thousand inhabitants and is situated in an oasis of wheat and corn dotted with mills. The wheat and corn brought...
Sloane Crosley’s debut novel The Clasp is the story of three college friends – Kezia, Victor and Nathanial – each of whom is reassessing their friendships, careers and love lives as they turn 30. Written in the style of a comedy caper, while also owing much of its inspiration to Guy de Maupassant’s famous short...
