
Elif Shafak: Time to reconnect
Elif Shafak’s richly evocative, elegantly crafted novel The Island of Missing Trees transports readers between 1970s Cyprus and 21st–century London in a cross-generational saga of passion, trauma, memory and renewal. Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne fall in love as teenagers in the divided city of Nicosia in 1974, meeting undercover in the back...

Tessa McWatt: A place in the world
Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line throws together four strangers at a wedding in the Indian Himalayan foothills. Twenty-five-year-old Reema is a classical singer born in India but raised as a Londoner, who has travelled without her Scottish boyfriend. Having recently discovered she is pregnant, she is facing a life-shifting decision about her future. Yosh is...

Larkin, Sebald and the backs of envelopes
Jessie Greengrass burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with her prize-winning story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, and her debut novel Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Her second novel The High House is a stunning investigation of the extraordinary and...