Just after the Twin Towers crash down, Scottish reporter Adam Kellas is posted to Afghanistan. His job – to send dispatches on the Taliban back to The Citizen newspaper – is a doddle...
Literary critic James Wood is widely admired but equally contested – an aesthete with the precision of a drill bit and a lethal hawk’s eye for detail. This small, measured book about...
Oscar de León lives in New Jersey, weighs over 300 pounds, reads and writes copious amounts of science fiction, and falls deeply in love with nearly every girl he meets. He is a comic...
Forget good cheer: Nell Leyshon’s West Country is a dark and significant place where the only apples going spare are full of tainted knowledge. On stage, Leyshon’s loaded scraps of...
If you’ve got young kids there’s a fair chance you won’t want them perusing our ‘Sex and books' feature online. Probably not the ideal trigger for that ‘birds and...
Although the ‘I had such a terrible childhood’ genre is oversaturated and notable chiefly for covers featuring black-and-white portraits of small children, Shalom Auslander’s...
Sketched in synopsis, Julie Myerson’s seventh novel resembles a childhood romp: a group of children run away from home at the height of a scorching summer and have a series of bizarre...
In a typically Saramagoan unnamed country filled with unnamed protaganists, a typically Saramagoan event takes place: or rather, it doesn’t. Death takes a break, leaving the dying hovering on...
Who would want Jan Egeland’s job? As UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs between 2003 and 2006, he hopped from hellhole to hellhole registering, recording and occasionally...
There is often an interesting clash between our sense of who a writer is and the self they reveal in private letters or in memoirs. This clash always ultimately resolves itself as part of the...
