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...
Everywhere but here
Kristin Hersh is probably the best singer-songwriter you have never heard of. Just like her music, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music & Motherhood (Jawbone press, 7 May) is poetic, lyrical and complex. I’ve been a fan (she prefers the word ‘listener’) since the early 1990s. Her band Throwing Muses has been around since the...
Bright white hearts
“The sky is falling!” I cried. “It’s falling fast!” “Where?”’ “It’s falling into the ocean.” And everyone watched as the sun sank into the sea, and the moon laughed from the clouds, and the people cried until salt water came up to their chins. “The water wants our words,” they said. “It can’t have them!”...
Laura McVeigh: Journeys of the mind
Laura McVeigh’s debut novel Under the Almond Tree is a vibrant and tender modern fable of a young life blighted by war. Fifteen–year-old Samar is displaced from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and narrates her story from aboard the Trans-Siberian Express as it trundles east and west between Moscow and Vladivostok. With family and memories in tow, as...
In defence of book learning
Running for President in 1952, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson came up with a peculiar rallying cry. “Eggheads of the world, unite!” he declared in a stump speech. “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” These days, of course, such a bad pun wouldn’t make it out of a Democratic Party focus group alive, but...
Whit Stillman: All there
You’d be forgiven for not exactly jumping with joy at the news that yet another Jane Austen adaptation has hit the big screen. This year alone has seen the release of both Burr Steer’s irreverent and rather dubious Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the publication of Curtis Sittenfeld’s contemporary reimagining of the original, Eligible....
Riad Sattouf: Tykes and tyrants
In The Arab of the Future, his first book to be published in English, bestselling French comics artist and former Charlie Hebdo contributor Riad Sattouf begins an epic five-volume graphic memoir about his formative years as the son of a volatile but vulnerable Syrian father and a forbearing French mother. Told with childlike wonder and...
The Arab of the future
This No.1 French bestseller tells the story of the author’s formative years spent in the shadows of three dictators: Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez al-Assad – and his father. Capturing the immediacy of innocence and the fervour of political idealism, Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria as his...
