Books & Poetry

The illustrations scattered through Kitty Hauser’s new book are not the family snaps one expects to find in a biography. An ordinary patterned carpet is shown from two angles. An aerial shot...

Adam Thorpe’s new novel could be read as a companion piece to his last, ‘Between Each Breath’. Both take a scalpel to middle-class smugness via an unsettling encounter with...

It’s day tripping season – but where to go? A bit of advance planning always pays off and in ‘Adventure Walks for Families in and Around London’, Becky Jones and Clare Lewis...

Kathy Acker ended one of her novels: ‘One day, maybe, there’d be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust.’ ‘Friction’...

Alexandra Fuller was born in England, grew up in southern Africa and now lives in Wyoming. Her first books drew on the middle phase of her life; this, her third, is a non-fiction tale anchored in...

Lady Idina Sackville was the daughter of Earl De La Warr who romped through the shredded social scene of London after the Great War and straight into the high jinx of Kenya’s Happy Valley...

Ginny has dedicated her life to the study of moths. In Bulbarrow Court, the rural mansion where she has lived all her life, the attic rooms and outhouses are entirely given over to larvae boxes,...

The publication of a new picture book from Anthony Browne is always a welcome event. His use of visual puns in almost photographic watercolours means that each illustration merits close scrutiny....

Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Siege’ is a satire on life in Hoxha’s Stalinist Albania with show trials and pseudoscience getting in the way of what the state, in the shape of the...

Grand pasticheur Sebastian Faulks rather soft-pedals his mimicry of Ian Fleming in his first Bond, which picks up where Fleming left off (‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ in 1966) and...