19th March 2025
‘Alderman, Powers and Kushner all use fiction to think creatively about our contemporary moment, connecting ideas about past, present and future, human and non-human intelligence, in thoughtful and surprising ways.’
19th February 2025
'Season of the Swamp wavers between different ideas of itself, at times seeming a loving meditation on the character of a specific place, while at others it becomes a rollicking tale of rebels in exile, men of history in the interregnum before they arise to their destinies.'
29th January 2025
‘I suppose I’m taking the “joy” that I looked for in poetry last year to be something like little pockets of lightness or beginning. Not a turning away from the world as we know it (nor, as Rukeyser suggests, from the parts of the worlds we don’t know or understand), but a way to be in it. I found this kind of joy in several Irish poetry collections in 2024.’
18th December 2024
'Every plainly elegant passage here is charged by shadow narratives around the book, its project, its author and its ‘author’. No matter how outlandish the image or the detail, everything scans as a mise-en-abyme—an image of the book within the book. How’s this resignification achieved so absolutely? What is this thing that you’re reading?'
15th November 2024
In Old Romantics, the drudge becomes the show. Pain is distilled into humour and absurdity. Here is a writer who likes to amuse, indulge, titillate and engage, inviting us to follow the chaos right from the opening lines of the opening story.
24th October 2024
‘Discussions of autism often focus on our brains as the source of how we think, but our brains also govern our senses, and so thorough portraits of autistic characters are necessarily physical and sensual. In All The Little Bird-Hearts, Sunday's first-person voice captures her embodied experience of the world.’
20th September 2024
'We need more books like Pleasure Gardens for other regions around the world. It is an account that fundamentally magnifies the voices of the Kashmiri people, dignifies their portraits, and does the work of speaking truth to power.'
21st August 2024
‘Love the World or Get Killed Trying flouts the rules. It makes up words, like “marvelocity” and “thoughtfeelings”. It’s overwrought, repetitive, rash; it rises to heights of operatic intensity and delivers long, meandering anecdotes. All of this only adds to the charisma of the book and the rare urgency it is charged with.’
23rd July 2024
‘The Coming Thing is a complex book… the heightened brevity of its compressed form hits the reader with the full blast of joy and angst that characterise Imelda’s life as we buzz through the pages high on mad panicked anxiety, vicariously sipping Dubonnet and slugging bottles of Stag and Benylin cough mixture.’
13th June 2024
‘Klein’s book also tells us that fear is a trap; what we cannot push away, into a shadow self, we must integrate instead, learning uncomfortable truths about ourselves in the process. What if we stop seeing the doppelganger as the enemy, and start thinking of them as a part of ourselves, gone rogue after years of being neglected and ignored?’