Suspicious minds, alternative truths
Berlin is a city with drama at its heart, and it’s impossible not be drawn in by the charisma of it. I first arrived there on a three-month scholarship to research the book that would become I Laugh Me Broken but then I found I was unable to leave. I was never quite finished with trying to...
Rijula Das: The constant smallness of being
Set in Calcutta’s notorious red-light district Sonagachi, Rijula Das’s debut Small Deaths resists lazy stereotypes. Years of research have provided Das with an intimate understanding of the power dynamics at play between the madams, pimps and police, and how their often-cruel manoeuvrings have devastating consequences for the endless stream of girls and young women trafficked...
Chloe Lane: To any lengths
Twenty-six-year-old Erin Moore has just been dumped by her gallery-owner boss after his wife discovered them in a compromising clinch in a store cupboard. She heads north from Auckland to spend the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend at the old family farmstead, where her mother Helen, terminally ill with motor neurone disease, is being cared for...
Magpies
The girl tenses when her mother calls her name like that. She clings to the racks; sleeves brushing against her cheek. She crosses the store. Normally, her mother doesn’t like to be overt; only gentle movements when she’s found what she wants. Sometimes the girl won’t even notice. Today, though, she is loud. She is...
Misfiring love
I’m really not a big romance fan, but I have to admit I do love a bad romance. Here are some of the fictional relationships that have stayed with me since first encounters – some troubled, some problematic, and some downright bizarre – from my formative years up to more recent times. Manhattan, written...
My own private love club
Robert Glancy’s debut novel Terms & Conditions tells the story of a lawyer specialising in jargon-filled small print and footnotes no one ever reads, whose life unravels after an apparent road accident. He looks back with fond imagination on a book tour that turned out nothing like a car crash. 1 February The launch of...
Katherine Mansfield: ‘Bliss’
“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks...
Katherine Mansfield: ‘At the Bay’
However you choose to dissect her best work, (and she did do some that wasn’t all that), Katherine Mansfield was a revolutionary writer. She was a symbolist and a modernist and her stories were, according to katherinemansfield.com, the “first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot.” Commenting on Somerset Maugham’s ‘Rain’,...
Which would you choose?
In the December 2013 issue we launched our ‘Favourite Stories’ feature, with seven writers each introducing a short story which they feel stands out as a shining example of the form. Suzanne Berne picks out a perfect sketch from recent Nobel Prize winner and short-story stylist Alice Munro, Sophie Hannah weighs up Herman Melville’s ever-popular...
Eleanor Catton: Eyes wide open
I meet Eleanor Catton in the Langham Hotel straight after her Woman’s Hour debut and the day before the Booker shortlist announcement. I have a feeling that her second and most recent novel, The Luminaries, will be on the shortlist and I also have a feeling that she already knows whether it is or not....
