Books Archives - The Glasgow Guardian



Notes on Booker Prize 2023 winner Prophet Song

27th November 2023

Paul Lynch, winner of The Booker Prize 2023, told the awards ceremony that he risked “dooming his career” by writing Prophet Song. His dystopian novel follows an ordinary, middle-class family, The Stacks, whose lives deteriorate in tandem with the city where they live, Dublin. Written poetically – with no paragraph breaks or speech marks – ...


Review: Baek Sehee’s i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki

24th November 2023

 A powerful memoir that risks becoming gospel. i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki is marketed as “part memoir, part self-help book.” Its format is unusual: recorded conversations between the author and her psychiatrist constitute the bulk of the text, before an epilogue serves as a personal reflection. In this epilogue, Baek ...


Theatrical agony in The Virgin Suicides

24th November 2023

Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut celebrates its 30th year anniversary. CW: Suicide Written in 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut The Virgin Suicides celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. The Virgin Suicides’ plot is outlined within the first couple of pages, opening on “the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide.” There are five teenage girls ...


Horizontal Advice with Cheryl Strayed

24th November 2023

Constance Roisin talks to Cheryl Strayed about love, sense of self and agony aunts. Tiny Beautiful Things, which aired earlier this year on Hulu, has a unique premise. Clare, an anonymous agony aunt (played brilliantly by Kathryn Hahn), shares the same past with real-life Dear Sugar author Cheryl Strayed. Her present, on the other hand, ...


The celebrity and the ghost

24th November 2023

Millie Bobby Brown joins the cast of celebrities vilified for their use of ghost writers with her debut Nineteen Steps. Another victim of the ‘actor turned author’ pandemic has been named. Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown released her debut novel Nineteen Steps this September, joining the ever-expanding list of celebrities who have developed an ...


Love and Horror in Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea

31st October 2023

A woman returns from the deep sea, irrevocably changed. In a small, tidy flat located in an unnamed British city that is “veined with water like the lines on the back of a hand,” housewife Miri tries desperately to reconnect with her wife Leah, who has returned from a disastrous deep-sea mission irrevocably changed. As ...


Book Review: Throne of the Fallen

19th October 2023

Sex, art, and scandal in Kerri Maniscalco’s latest novel. “Unlike in a fairy-tale, the prince who’s coming for Camilla isn’t at all charming. But like all storybook villains, if Camilla isn’t careful, this dark prince just might end up capturing her heart.” Kerri Maniscalco, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, returns to the world ...


Five Books on Metafiction

12th October 2023

From Austen to Calvino; essential works of fiction about fiction. Generally one of the more challenging concepts in contemporary literary theory, metafiction is defined by the Oxford English dictionary as “fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions.” It is, at ...


“It’s the underbelly, the dark side of the story” – in conversation with David Grann

11th October 2023

Author David Grann talks to the Glasgow Guardian about his latest book, The Wager. After completing Killers of the Flower Moon — which has been adapted by Martin Scorsese, and is coming out later this month — David Grann knew he wanted to write about mutiny. It was whilst exploring this theme that he came ...


How we write abuse

11th October 2023

A reading of the controversial novel A Little Life. CW: Rape, Paedophilia, Self-Harm A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara chronicles the life of Jude St. Francis — whose past is shrouded in mystery — and his college friends Malcolm, Willem and Jean-Baptiste (aka JB). The story begins with the four of them plunging into New ...