Harriet Constable: The Instrumentalist
In 1696 a baby was posted through the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice. She was named Anna Maria della Pietà and become one of the greatest violinists of the eighteenth century. Her teacher was Antonio Vivaldi… YET THIS EXTRAORDINARY MUSICIAN remains largely unknown today. Numerous historical records exist – she...
Jessica Anthony: Orbiting the brink
Set over the course of a sunny November day in suburban Delaware in the late 1950s, Jessica Anthony’s The Most dissects the hopes, uncertainties and secret desires of a married couple whose life hasn’t quite panned out as they’d hoped. Handsome people-pleaser Virgil Beckett drifted into a job as an insurance agent, but is ill-equipped...
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Origins and uncertainties
Susan Muaddi Darraj began her debut novel Behind You Is the Sea six years ago, as a series of interlinked portraits of daily life among the Palestinian diaspora in Baltimore. The stories that make up the novel are centred on three Palestinian American families who are rooted in a common identity, but whose concerns are...
Elsa Drucaroff, Rodolfo Walsh and Argentina
The years of the military Junta cast a very long shadow in Argentina, and it’s thoroughly poignant that Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case appears in English just as the country has taken a swerve in a desperate new direction. I had never heard of Rodolfo Walsh. That was put right by Slava Faybysh when he brought...
Kate Brody: Missing people, muddled lives
Kate Brody’s pacy debut thriller is a novel of our times. A missing woman, social media conspiracy theories, mental health issues, suspicion, trust, self-harm and family trauma are woven together to give us a troubling, riveting and sharply written noir set on America’s East Coast. What’s the worst that can happen when you’ve already lost...
Ami Rao: All life is here
Ami Rao’s Boundary Road is an inventively structured, deftly observed and uncompromisingly raw snapshot of contemporary multicultural London in which two young passengers on the Number 13 bus from central to north London have fleeting encounter whilst lost in their own pasts. Aron is making a new start as an assistant in a suit shop,...
Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious
Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul
Megan McCubbin, a familiar face to viewers of the BBC’s Springwatch and Animal Park, is a passionate and eloquent champion of wildlife and one of Britain’s foremost young naturalists. Having grown up in and around the Isle of Wight Zoo, and travelled the world on assignment with step-dad and now fellow Springwatch presenter Chris Packham...
Claire Fuller: Polpo fiction
Claire Fuller’s latest novel The Memory of Animals imagines a near-future London paralysed by a devastating pandemic that has wiped out much of the world’s population. The narrator Neffy, a marine biologist with an obsessive interest in cephalopods, is among a band of young, healthy volunteers in a vaccine trial. At the beginning of the...
Kate Simants: Extreme reality
Reality TV is dead! Long live reality TV! And so it goes. Just when we think audiences have had enough, and production companies are scraping the barrel for ideas, along comes another surprise that grips the nation. This winter, it was The Traitors that got the whole nation talking – and not just about how Claudia Winkelman...
Translators Aloud: Charlotte Coombe and Tina Kover
In May 2020, in the early months of the first Covid-19 lockdown, Tina Kover posted on Twitter that she was considering uploading a video of herself reading from one of her translations but wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in watching such a thing. Amid a flurry of replies, fellow translator Charlie Coombe suggested...
Ann-Helén Laestadius: Lost lands and lost lives
Ann-Helén Laestadius’ Stolen is a forceful story of a young Sámi woman battling to preserve the lifestyle and traditions of reindeer herders in Sweden amid a wave of torture and massacre of the animals on whose livelihood they depend. At the age of nine, Elsa witnesses the aftermath of the brutal killing of her favourite...
