wed 16/07/2025

book reviews and features

Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands review - a case of murder mind

Olivia Fletcher

Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises...

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Sudhir Hazareesingh: Black Spartacus review – the life, and thought, of the first black super-hero

Boyd Tonkin

The former slave, and coachman on a sugar plantation, began one of his early public proclamations in a typically defiant vein: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name.” At that...

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Ian Williams: Reproduction review - a dazzling kaleidoscope of life's tragicomedy

Daniel Lewis

Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has...

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Emma Cline: Daddy review - scintillating short stories by the author of The Girls

Markie Robson-Scott

The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story...

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Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto

James Dowsett

On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the...

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James Rebanks: English Pastoral, An Inheritance review - a manifesto for a radical agricultural rethink

India Lewis

Coming from a family of farmers, with periods of time spent working on a farm in the past ten years, I found James Rebanks’ English Pastoral: An Inheritance to be a highly...

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William Feaver: The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailed

Marina Vaizey

This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by...

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Nick Hornby: Just Like You review - funny but inauthentic Brexit novel

Sarah Collins

Nick Hornby’s protagonists are worlds apart. Joseph is a Black 22-year-old with a “portfolio career", which includes shift work at a butcher’s and a leisure centre and the distant dream of...

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Susanna Clarke: Piranesi review - the mysteries of the House

Boyd Tonkin

The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted...

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Matthew Sperling: Viral review - whip-smart satire about the void at the heart of tech

Daniel Lewis

Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already...

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