Category: Reviews

Gary Raymond’s latest book, Angels of Cairo, is a taut and very funny cautionary tale about the perils of creative obsession, set over one nail-biting day of angst and self-discovery. Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor, and broadcaster who has two previously published novels, The Golden Orphans and For Those Who Come After, as well as the non-fiction […]
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Lies and the Brontës: The Quest for the Jenkins Family

Jemma L King is amused, enthused and finally admiring of a rich portrait of a period, from micro to macro, and a book that is at once complex and likely to be debated in years to come

PUBLISHED ON: 27/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

What actually is a biography? Who gets to define the truthful representation of a subject, who has the authority? And if we are being honest with ours …

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Terminal Boredom: Stories

Lloyd Markham admires a classic collection of Japanese stories in translation whose strength lies in their function as sci-fi vignettes as well as period pieces of the burnt-out sixties and hungover seventies

PUBLISHED ON: 23/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

The first English-language publication of the works of late artist provocateur and cult sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories, is a di …

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Please

Laura Wainwright on a clever, funny and ultimately very moving novel that explores how language is ‘the very stuff of us’

PUBLISHED ON: 23/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

Is there any writer, of any genre, who can’t relate to the following thoughts?   I struggle to make it say what I wish, let alone wrestle it into …

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Wilderness

Not one for the literary crime lover, this roadtrip novel – pat, porny, pacy – is a killer ‘dom noir’ thriller, writes Chris Moss

PUBLISHED ON: 01/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

BE Jones has pretty much mastered the page-turning thriller style. She delivers the utterly confusing prologue readers seem to adore. Her characters a …

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Looking Out

Chris Moss assesses six essays that articulate the relationship between class and some of the most significant Welsh artworks of the past two centuries, gives them due recognition within the international art world, and explores the collusion of Wales in neglect of its own artists and its failure to value the quality of ‘insiderness’

PUBLISHED ON: 01/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

As well as death and taxes, it’s highly probable the British nations will always have their social classes. After all, accurate histories of the twent …

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Road Trip

Pam Thompson recommends a compassionate, complex poetry collection of the Windrush generation and rural Gwent

PUBLISHED ON: 01/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

Marvin Thompson was born in London to Jamaican parents and now lives in south Wales. His debut collection, Road Trip https://www.peepaltreepress.com/b …

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The Cormorant

Laura Wainwright is intrigued by a classic horror novel in which the bird is an avatar of male vulnerabilities

PUBLISHED ON: 01/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

The cormorant is a strange-looking bird, with its thick, snaking neck; downturned, heavy prehistoric bill (yellow against the dark plumage) and blue-g …

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An Exact Mystery: The Poetic Life of Vernon Watkins

Chris Moss is uncertain whether the poet’s early years and work deserve such fulsome treatment, but looks forward to a second volume on the life, troubles, connections and poetry of an undeservedly neglected writer and friend of Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas and Alfred Janes

PUBLISHED ON: 01/07/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

‘A biography of Vernon Watkins is long overdue,’ Richard Ramsbotham tells us in his introduction to this self-published book. He notes that his wish ‘ …

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Hana

Chris Moss respects an imperfect novel about intergenerational trauma in wartime and Soviet Czech life, noting silence at contrapuntal play with booming survival guilt

PUBLISHED ON: 19/05/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

When a typhoid epidemic tears through the small town of Meziříčíin in 1953, nine-year-old Mira is orphaned and forced to turn to her aunt Hana. A woma …

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