A new Ali Smith book is always an event – or should that be, a series of events. Artful (2012) started as lectures she gave at Oxford University, and became a ghost story novel-cum-essay. How to Be Both (2014) featured two stories that could be printed either way round. Her Seasonal Quartet formed rapidly-written responses to current affairs – with the years between Autumn in 2016 and Summer in 2020 offering plenty of material.
Continue reading “Review: Gliff, Ali Smith”Category: Books
Sherlock’s toughest case — can the sleuth draw a new audience to opera?
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It’s one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous lines but you’ve never heard it like this before: sung in a rich, deep bass courtesy of Edward Hawkins, a knowing smile playing around his lips. As the now singing detective, he takes the lead in the first Sherlock Holmes opera to hit the stage.
Continue reading “Sherlock’s toughest case — can the sleuth draw a new audience to opera?”The rise of the slow living movement
How does the idea of doing nothing for a year sound? No work, no emails, no career progression, no striving or achieving or being productive. For many of us, such a thought might once have brought its own anxiety attack – surely, work is status, earning money is achievement, and being busy is a brag? But these days, a year of nothing is more likely to sound dreamy, even aspirational – there has been, as they say, a vibe shift.
Continue reading “The rise of the slow living movement”Review: Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers
With her last novel, Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers experienced the sort of quiet success story that gladdens the heart. With her eight previous books mostly out of print, and having not published in a decade, Chambers considered Small Pleasures a last roll of the dice. She spun the literary equivalent of double sixes, producing a tender tale about a female journalist in 1950s south London suburbia that captured readers’ hearts and became a huge word-of-mouth hit.
Continue reading “Review: Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers”Review: Goodlord, Ella Frears
When I tell you that poet Ella Frears’s new “novelistic text” takes the form of one long email to a landlord, you might balk. You shouldn’t: Goodlord is a dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny. Despite not having much of a plot – a young woman complains to her estate agent about the degradations of the housing market and what it means to be a young woman – Goodlord zips along, blackly compelling and readable.
Continue reading “Review: Goodlord, Ella Frears”Review: The Buddha of Suburbia, RSC
Welcome to Bromley, 1976 – and a tale of “betrayal, deceit and heart-following”. It’s told by Karim, a young man still finding his feet as he attempts to strut towards adulthood. Even with an almost three-hour running time, this sprawling story – about the 17-year-old mixed-race, British-Indian Karim and the travails of his immigrant family – can feel fit to burst in Emma Rice and Hanif Kureishi’s adaptation of the latter’s debut 1990 novel.
Continue reading “Review: The Buddha of Suburbia, RSC”‘Readers loved the fisting’: Why novels need good sex scenes
When I published my first novel two years ago, I was naturally nervous about how people would react. What Time Is Love? imagines what happens when one couple meets at three different points in the 20th century, and I worried whether I’d got the different time periods right, or if my readers would care about my characters equally… I worried if anyone would even read it at all.
Continue reading “‘Readers loved the fisting’: Why novels need good sex scenes”Review: Enlightenment, Sarah Perry
Enlightenment is a book by an author at the top of their game. And when that author is Sarah Perry, whose previous works include the bestselling The Essex Serpent and Melmoth, that’s high praise indeed. This is a fat, satisfying, grown-up novel – rich in plot, characters, ideas, structure, and atmosphere. Most writers only really deliver on a few of those; in this book about astronomy, faith, and devotional love in all its forms, Perry leaves none behind.
Continue reading “Review: Enlightenment, Sarah Perry”An open relationship taught me everything I needed to know about love
Sleeping with someone other than your partner is the ultimate betrayal – the worst thing you can do in a romantic relationship, right? Not necessarily. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the best lessons I’ve learned in how to be a good partner, and have a good relationship, came from exploring non-monogamy.
Continue reading “An open relationship taught me everything I needed to know about love”Review: Memory Piece, Lisa Ko
The first section of Lisa Ko’s novel follows a Chinese-American artist, Giselle Chin, who in 1996 begins a durational work called Memory Piece: she writes down her memories for seven hours a day, for a year – and at the end she burns the lot. But in Memory Piece, the book, the documenting of life becomes something precious and worth preserving.
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