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After the success of her debut, Kokomo, in 2020, Victoria Hannan’s second novel is another study of friendship. Its five characters have been friends since university. They are now in their thirties and each is grappling with a pre mid-life but post first-flush weariness. But this weariness is not ennui; through their shifting points of view, Hannan brings us their shared sorrow.
Oh William! is another extraordinary insight into being human.
Unbound is a new, author-centred publishing model. It's a welcome addition to the industry.
Torrey Peters has written a complex and deeply moving novel about the ties that bind us – ties that govern our choices about who we love, how we love, and the costs. Detransition, Babyfollows a trio: Reece, a trans woman; her ex, detransitioned Ames (formerly Amy); and Ames’s new partner, a cis heterosexual woman, Katrina, as they each struggle with the idea of parenthood.
Someone recently tweeted that if we gave male violence the same attention as Covid, men would have been under curfew for ever. Published in 2021, this prescient novel deals with both themes, taking the sickness inhabiting the world as an extended metaphor. Though the book’s few time-markers place it in separate periods in the millenium’s teens, the before times, both the virus and the impact of male predation are woven throughout as real and malevolent presences.
Applying technical writing skills to learning a complex martial arts pattern....
My review of Jessica Francis Kane's funny and moving novel, Rules for Visiting, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. I loved its insights and it made me laugh out loud. In one particularly comic scene, May finds Hello Barbie, the new doll belonging to her friend’s daughter, tucked into her bed. When I …
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Is the independent bookshop viable? Recently, I listened to Jemma Birrell’s interview with Sylvie Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, that famous bookshop on the banks of the Seine in Paris, and it prompted some thoughts.
We’re now into the final month of this year, 2020, year of the plague; the year when the days ran into each other without bearings or markers, and ruled by fear. Check in. Wash your hands. Sanitise. Remember your mask. Wipe it down. Use an anti-bacterial, use a detergent. Don’t get too close. Don’t breathe. …
"The author–editor relationship is little understood outside the publishing industry and often mischaracterised by those within it. Commentators agree that this relationship is difficult to define and complicated, with the distribution of power ebbing and flowing in response to a variety of pressures.... Adding to the mystique, the editor’s role in book production is opaque. Editors have …
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