Books & Poetry

Being hailed as the next big anything brings with it obvious pitfalls. In Richard Mason’s case, the problem was simply that, despite huge hype, his debut ‘The Drowning People’,...

In ‘One of Us’, Melissa Benn’s second novel, she observes the rise of an ambitious MP through the eyes of Anna Adams, the daughter of a successful left-leaning lawyer and his...

Despite his ageless appearance, Paddington Bear is 50 this year. He’s had a phenomenally successful career since his arrival from ‘Darkest Peru’ in 1958, encompassing a starring...

The erotic is a shadow borderland, a mirror where fantasies and memories dance in and out of each other, where you can never say with certainty that this is a dream, and thus trivial, and that,...

This collection of short stories coincides with a season of talks, screenings and exhibitions to mark the fortieth anniversary of 1968 as an apogee of radical thought and protest. Editor Nicholas...

Tim Ecott’s mother was forced to steal electricity and water to survive poverty in rural South Africa in the 1980s. His father abandoned the family after growing to hate the stifling heat and...

Three women decide to visit their three adult sons and stay with them for a week to assess the state of maternal/ filial love. The women are all friends, all Londoners, all middle-class. The men...

It’s 2140 and Anna is a teenage ‘surplus’ – a child born illegally into a world with an immortal population and resources too depleted to accommodate any more people. Anna...

There’s a quiet, stalking charm to rookie American playwright Joshua Furst’s debut novel, a tender, coming-of-age story that plots the cracked pavements of adolescence across the bleak,...

To its devotees, surfing may be as essential as breathing but to many in our damp riverside city, it’s about as exciting a topic. Nevertheless, as the Australian writer Tim Winton well knows,...