Reviewed by Zoë Fairbairns
It’s the lady and the tiger – or, to be more precise, a tiger and two ladies. Ruth has a home help, the competent and apparently-caring Frida, who prepares Ruth’s food, protects her from the tiger, keeps the house clean, and ever so gently takes over the management of Ruth’s finances. Frida’s origins are shrouded in mystery – is she really, as she claims, a government employee? [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Alison Burns
It is October 1912. Acclaimed novelist and critic E.M. Forster (known as Morgan) is bound for India, hoping for change. En route, he invents a clandestine affair between one of his shipboard acquaintances, a handsome army officer appropriately named Searight, and another young man on board, the sole Indian passenger. ‘Lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky, breeding dreams of murder: he sensed the beginnings of a story.’ [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Jessica Mann
Rebecca Mead lives in the United States where she is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, but she was born and grew up in England. She was seventeen when she first read Middlemarch and felt that it was speaking directly to her; she could see her own life in that of its heroine Dorothea, both of them young women living in the English provinces waiting for real life to begin. She has re-read it every five years since then. ‘There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like the graft to a tree.’ [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by N.J. Cooper
Laura Wilson’s latest instalment in the saga of DI Stratton’s life and work looks at the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s. At a time when Ladies Bountiful were still doing most of the social work in the slums of W11, and immigrants from the Caribbean were so shut out from profitable employment and so ripped-off by Rachman-esque landlords that pimping was a more or less rational life choice, Stratton has to deal with the murder of a rent collector. He soon finds himself investigating prostitution, running battles between the new immigrants and the indigenous teddy boys, and another murder, all taking place in the streets and squares where houses now sell for many millions. With her usual impeccable research and elegant prose, Laura Wilson evokes a world that has almost completely gone now and yet still explains much about London sixty years on [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner
Anarchists and Futurists, installationists and motor cyclists, Minimalists and Fascists. Rachel Kushner’s dazzling second novel overflows with material and stories, a cornucopia of historically rooted invention. Speed trials in the American salt flats, fatuous artistic dinner party conversations in New York, Italian snobbery on the shores of Lake Como, hand-to-hand combat in World War I, political uprising and repression in Rome – all these and far more are delivered in prose so supple and electric that the only applicable term is virtuoso [Read more...]
Reviewed by N.J. Cooper
Her answers to this question and many others addressed to her by enemies, supporters, neighbours, teachers, and her confused children, are offered with intelligence, charm and generosity. There is necessarily some repetition, but it is clear that, however often she points out that ‘atrocities carried out in the name of Islam’ are aberrations and not an essential part of being a Muslim, there are plenty of people of all persuasions who remain to be convinced [Read more...] in Reviews
Of course, some of us have been favouring women’s writing for ages, but for others, newly stimulated by the latest Vida figures which show not much shift in the gender imbalance when it comes to books and reviews by women, it’s time to take action. Read the Guardian’s article and be prepared to cast aside blokes’ books for a while in order to free your mind from innate attitudes to what a level publishing playing field looks like. [Read more...] in News and events
