Within the layers of Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel are questions of agency, identity and interpretation. This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of...
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Fever Dream, Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin has a talent for unsettling stories. These stories are weird and wonderful, and, given the strange behaviour of people that we hear about every day,...
Maryrose Cuskelly’s novel seems to have taken Arthur Conan Doyle’s maxim to heart: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Cuskelly was born in Queensland, where there were several...
The author of The Magician is also a skilled essayist, ranging across the personal, religion, and literature. In the first essay in this collection, ‘Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall’, Colm Toibin describes being diagnosed with testicular cancer. At...
This insider’s satire of university life is no advertisement for an academic career. The premise of John Dale’s new novel is simple, age-old even: ambitious young thing gets dream job – but discovers that, in reality, it’s closer to a nightmare....
Jessica Johns’ debut novel does not discount the importance of dreams and the persistence of spirits. Jessica Johns claims that she wrote her horror-inspired novel Bad Cree ‘as a form of revenge’. The revenge was against what could be described as...
