RisingTideFallingStar by Philip Hoare review – a love of the ocean wave
There’s a radiant passage at the end of Philip Hoare’s prize-winning 2008 book Leviathan, where the author describes diving with a group of sperm whales off the Azores. He gazes into the ocean around him, endlessly deep, endlessly wide. “It was as if I were looking into the universe,” he writes. A vast whale swims […]
Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill: check out rave reviews from the New York Times and the New Yorker
“It is trim rather than bulky, refrains from indulging in too many antique spellings, and tells its story with crafty precision. [Spufford is] capable of making any topic, however unlikely, at once fascinating and amusing…Golden Hill…keeps its theme—the moral conundrum of America—ever in its sights, through breakneck chase scenes and dark nights of the soul. […]
The Meaning of Cricket by Jon Hotten, ‘the Montaigne of sports-writers’, reviewed by Tom Holland (The Spectator)
One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect […]
Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney: Human tragedy in the age of medical absurdity
Review by Cathy Rentzenbrink
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford – Review
New York in the 18th century is brought brilliantly to life in Francis Spufford’s debut novel
Brix Smith Start: ‘Mark E Smith? He’s complicated’
Ex-Fall guitarist Brix Smith Start endured wild and colourful marriages with both Mark E Smith and Nigel Kennedy. Now she’s written her memoir… In May 1983, Brix Smith, then aged 20, arrived in Manchester. A Californian by birth and disposition, her first impressions of the city were not favourable. The buildings, she writes in her […]
Two Aitken Alexander authors picked for Waterstones’ books to read this month
Read more about The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis, and Anatomy Of A Soldier by Harry Parker here
CLEAR THE FIELD FOR THE BEST BRITISH WAR NOVEL IN YEARS
Captain Harry Parker lost both his legs to a Helmand province IED in 2009 and had a quarter-hour of fame carrying the Paralympic Torch in 2012 at the behest of Price Harry. Anatomy of a Soldier, Parker’s first book, with further his notability, because it has every chance of being the best British war novel of […]
The Button Box by Lynn Knight – The Guardian review
Do you have a happy relationship with your clothes?
Extravagant praise for Kevin Barry’s new novel ‘Beatlebone’
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2015 Read Kevin’s interview in Slate here. ‘In razor-sharp prose, Barry’s novel imagines John Lennon in 1978, on a journey through the west of Ireland in search of his creative self, conversing with an Irish driver’ New York Times 100 Notable Books 2015 […]