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 – ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
