Category: Reviews
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Groundskeeping
Groundskeeping is a beautifully written debut novel that contends with questions of class, family and love. Cole’s protagonist Owen is working as a groundskeeper at a university when he meets Alma, a writer who has taken up a prestigious fellowship. Over the course of their relationship Owen is forced to better understand his relationship to…
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Welsh Plural: Essays on the Future of Wales
The editors of Welsh Plural have gathered some of the most interesting and relevant writers from Wales to consider what Welsh identity means today. This is anything but niche: for anyone thinking about what identity, belonging and borders mean or could come to mean, this is helpful. It is no surprise that this anthology has…
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Frank and Bert
What should you do if your best friend always wants to play hide and seek but never wins? Frank the fox faces just this dilemma with his bear friend Bert. In this simple and funny picture book for young children, we explore ideas about what makes a good friend. Frank gives Bert an extra-long count so…
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Epic Adventures
Epic Adventures is a pleasingly large non-fiction picture book for children about great train journeys. From the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan to the Trans-Siberian express, this colourfully illustrated book inspires the wish to jump on a train and head off on an adventure. As we are just opposite London Bridge station, this urge is…
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Sea of Tranquility
Three people, separately and at different points over three hundred years, experience an anomaly. In the middle of their ordinary lives, there is an instant of blackness, a violin, a strange sound. Then everything reverts to normal. One of these is an exile from England in Canada in 1812; one a novelist visiting Earth on…
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All Through the Night
All Through the Night is a cheerful and entertaining picture book for young children about “people who work while we sleep”. We find out about cleaners and paramedics, journalists and bakers, and all kinds of folk who make our lives possible. It is a friendly and useful explanation about busy life carrying on even while…
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Galatea – a Short Story
This is an excellent new short story from the author of Circe and The Song of Achilles. I’ve not read those yet but I will do now, having read Galatea. Galatea is being kept a virtual prisoner in hospital on the wishes of her husband, with the complicity of the medical staff. Her husband, a…
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Paradais
The second of Fernanda Melchor’s novels to be translated into English and also longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Paradais is a slight volume nonetheless packed with violence and tension. Polo, the protagonist, is a teenage alcoholic stuck in a dead-end job working as a gardener for a luxury housing complex. He is abused by…
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Gretel the Wonder Mammoth
Gretel emerges from the ice to be feted as a Wonder Mammoth: an instant celebrity who makes lots of friends. But she is the last mammoth on Earth, which is always going to be tricky… Her friends love her, as she is kind and strong and tells the best bedtime stories. When everyone thinks you…
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Don’t Ask the Dragon
Alem is alone on his birthday and asks many different creatures what he should do – he is wondering where he should call home. None of them know but they all give him the same advice: “don’t ask the dragon – he will eat you!” Alem is one to think for himself, so when he…
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Milo Imagines the World
We travel on the subway with young boy Milo and his sister, on a journey they make every month. It’s a trip that causes complex emotions…”as usual, Milo is a shook-up soda. Excitement stacked on top of worry on top of confusion on top of love. To keep himself from bursting, he studies the faces…
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Bullet Train
As the Shinkansen bullet train speeds out of Tokyo, several of those on board seem to be on missions to kill. But who will kill, who will die, and why? This is a speedy and satisfying locked-room crime novel. It’s not clear at the outset how the disparate group of characters are connected. What links…
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Cold Enough For Snow
Cold Enough for Snow is a startling and subtle mediation on family and belonging from the winner of the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize. It is incredibly vivid and sensuous but it is also a gentle read, Au takes us movingly through different scenes, unhurried by plot. At times it’s reminiscent of a series of anecdotes,…
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The Madhouse at the End of the Earth
The Madhouse at the End of the Earth is an engrossing account of a journey to Antarctica in 1897. One thing after another goes wrong for the crew of the Belgian whaling ship the Belgica, and they get stranded for the whole of the winter darkness, their ship frozen in a sea of ice. Among…
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Happy Hour
Isa and her best friend Gala arrive in New York in the Summer of 2013 with a mission in mind, to have as much fun as possible. They recall the heroines of golden age Hollywood; in another era they could be Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Isa and Gala’s literary ancestors…
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London’s Hidden Walks volume 4
The pocket-sized London’s Hidden Walks series is well researched and handy. The latest addition, subtitled Every Street Has a Story to Tell, is a genial and inspiring guide to some hidden London treasures. Who knew that the Spanish Civil War memorial was right next to Fulham Palace? Or that the cabman’s shelter in Pimlico, a…
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We All Celebrate!
“Celebrations bring us together with music, dance and feasts. Our celebrations are not only steeped in customs and traditions, they evolve and change as we do”. We All Celebrate! is a bright and cheerful picture book from Riverside favourite Chitra Soundar, with jolly illustrations by Jenny Bloomfield. A lively and informative text lets us join…
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Islands of Abandonment – Life in the Post-Human Landscape
I read Islands of Abandonment in hardback during one of the lockdowns last year. I was transported to wildly different newly-wild places around the world, even as I couldn’t stir much from home: a former military base on a Scottish island; an abandoned agricultural institute in the Tanzanian mountains; the drowned homes and fields of…