‘The novel’s central question is this: can afflicted people find community and security outside of the households they were born into, or is everyone willing to manipulate and deceive those around them if the situation calls for it?’
Fonie Mitsopoulou reviews Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow.
‘“Fearsome” is a word I heard almost as soon as I stepped into the gallery. And perhaps this is a good corrective to the soft, all-giving image of Hawai‘i as the paradisal realm of flower-garlanded aloha. There isn’t a hula girl anywhere in sight here.’
Alex Wong reviews ‘Hawai‘i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans’ at the British Museum.
‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
‘It is easy to bemoan the quality of poetry’s decline, when in fact the quantity of good stuff published each year has stayed relatively constant, if you know where to look and whose judgement to trust.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
‘Both his Poems and Letters, in different registers, show a private poet courting lyric publicity and cultivating a voice of guarded ambiguity: memorable, yes, but sacrificing true risk for renown.’
Jack Barron reviews Seamus Heaney’s collected Poems and Letters.
‘Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.’
Hassan Akram reviews Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive.
‘While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience. In short, most men are losers.’
Guy Stagg reviews David Szalay’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Flesh.
‘The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions.’
Hugh Foley reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man.
‘Lockwood is taking the real and slipping it through genres in her efforts to capture it, resulting in a portrayal more authentic than straight fiction or memoir.’
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay reviews Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You.
‘Satisfaction, the novel suggests, is commingled: it is either heightened or diluted by the emotions of those around you.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer reviews Kathy Wang’s The Satisfaction Cafe.
‘The much-lauded style of Hollinghurst’s prose is abundantly present, with an elegance in the sentences that never obscures the pull of the narrative.’
Patrick Cash reviews Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings.
‘Charming and funny, warm and inquisitive, the reflecting Dyer provides a page-turner that entertains you just long enough to forget the sad fact of it all, that even camera-less pictures warp and fade.’
Joseph Williams reviews Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework.
‘Use the Words You Have is not just a novel of desire. It’s a meditation on the nature of language itself.’
Bruce Omar Yates reviews Kimberly Campanello’s debut novel, Use the Words You Have.
‘In the diaries’ dailiness, they allow for capaciousness, an expression – as with a regular routine of writing – of a relationship’s good days and bad.’
Lucy Thynne reviews Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries.
‘Where dominant narratives and imagery tend to sanitise motherhood, all white sheets or postpartum glow, Gore’s depiction is tender and painful in a way that feels truthful.’
Meesha Williams reviews Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer.
‘Whether in subject, form, style or quality, a shortlist can at least set out the stall of contemporary poetry and say: this is, for better or worse, what’s going on.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
‘Viney’s exhaustive and detailed study, encompassing the uses of twins in myth, literature, art and science, searches for ‘how twins fulfil and defy these and other expectations’.
Nicola Healey reviews Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins by William Viney.
‘The defining sensibility of Cole’s visual argot is a timeless ephemerality. His photographs twin the incidental with a profound belief in beauty.’
Sylee Gore reviews Pharmakon by Teju Cole.
‘Eire’s aim in this capacious, deeply researched and often perplexing book is to account for episodes of the miraculous from a historian’s perspective, seen through the retrospective lens of what has become known, if not universally, as the post-secular age.’
Stuart Walton reviews They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire.
‘Two recently published novels embrace ‘death is not the end’ as both axiom and narrative foundation stone, and traverse the great beyond to dizzying effect.’
Gary Kaill reviews The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino & It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken.
‘The short stories in this collection cannot, therefore, be read as lesser examples of Bolaño’s novels.’
Tommy Gilhooly on The Collected Stories of Roberto Bolaño.
‘There is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview.’
Luke Warde reviews ‘War’.
‘In the first half, Helen’s pursuit of and infatuation for Bertram seems sweet, comical and harmless; by the second, her actions have been shown to be what they always were: sexual harassment and assault.’
Zadie Loft reviews All’s Well That Ends Well.
‘The writing of Pleasure Gardens – and its reading – constitutes an act of resistance; a reclaiming of the digital narrative space that has been blacked out by the state and overwritten by its propaganda machine.’
Zoe Valery reviews ‘Pleasure Gardens’.
