Rym Kechacha reviews The Books of Jacob: a wonderful, huge and complex book that asks the reader to “turn our gaze away from the simple”, and instead embrace flux, transformation, and narrative that “sprawls like a great tree’s roots”.
Elodie Barnes talks to Emily Cooper about her debut collection Glass: poems which shift and reflect on the ideas of home as architectural space, home as memory space, permanence, impermanence, and the ‘ownership’ of stories.
This exhilarating anthology of short stories challenges us to look beyond the shiny façade of ‘the new’ and to embrace ‘the abject’ – the ambiguous, the old, the distressing parts of ourselves and our society – and to ask what place the abject should have in our culture today.
Shamini Sriskandarajah reviews this debut collection of London-based short stories, full of vivid, colourful characters and with a joyfully feminist streak.
Maria Stepanova’s memoir, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, weaves together storytelling, culture, art, and philosophy to form a mosaic image of her family’s history.
In her new book, Katherine Angel explores the nuances and complexities of consent, female desire, and vulnerability in a post #MeToo world, and asks whether explicit consent really does make sex good again.
Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez, and Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro: two new translated books from Charco Press that are quirky, poignant, and very relevant for our times.
After the mysterious disappearance of a toddler, past events involving siblings Laurel and Primrose resurface. Our arts contributor, Ishita Ranjan, reviews Alice Clark-Platts’ gripping crime thriller, The Flower Girls.
