Any novel narrated by an attractive young spy with large (and fake) breasts who stalks a group of French communists and tries to incite them to eco-terrorism can be cheesy. But a novel that also features emails full of lecture-like sermons detailing the history of radical groups and the relationship between Neanderthals and early Homo […]
Not all of Thompson’s subjects are crackpots. In fact, one of the more surprising episodes involves William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister. King’s 21 years in power – longer than those of any other British prime minister – spanned the turmoil of the Great Depression, the chaos of 1930s Europe and World War […]
Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut novel, The Girl of Ink & Stars (2016), was published when she was 26. It won the Waterstone’s Book Prize; her subsequent nine books were nominated for the Carnegie Medal three times. For readers who are new to Hargrave, the highly entertaining fantasy series Geomancer would be a good introduction. The […]
When she first sleeps with Arnold, Ida is 30, an editor and playwright, married with two young children. Arnold, a 39-year-old academic known for his Brecht translations, is also married – to a woman younger than Ida, with whom he has a three-year-old son – and he insists that he “cannot cope with another separation.” […]
A canon of children’s literature that is fit for the 21st century will therefore reflect the children who read it. It is no exaggeration to point out that audiences have changed since the all-conquering Enid Blyton and her contemporaries wrote predominantly about white, middle-class children in private boarding schools and set their adventures in nostalgically […]
“My Old School,” one of eight stories in Mark Haddon’s grim new collection, recalls – at first – some of the novels Roald Dahl conjured from his time at Repton. It’s no secret that the British boarding school experience was often bleak and full of abuse; recent memoirs by Earl Spencer and Alex Renton provide […]
At the beginning of Clare Chambers’ new novel, Shy Creatures, there is a sly allusion to some of her literary forebears: “(Helen) was looking for Larkin, although she secretly preferred Betjeman, whom Gil considered a ‘silly old maid’… Virginia Woolf was ‘largely unreadable’, DH Lawrence a genius, Graham Greene was ‘fiction, not literature’” – and […]
Following the pandemic-induced boom in “cozy crime” led by Richard Osman, several authors who might be described as “cozy-adjacent” have begun to tackle the subject. In “Death at the Sign of the Rook,” her sixth Jackson Brodie novel, Kate Atkinson is the latest to tell us that her private detective hero refuses to read “old-fashioned, […]
Late 20th-century Soviet science fiction writers and brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky argued that the sole purpose of a spacefaring species’ life was to ensure the well-being of the universe by promoting sentience, consciousness, and even happiness. To which Dolls, one of their most compelling alien protagonists, grumbles: Yes, but what kind of consciousness? What […]
