By Maria Bregman Reading Siân Hughes’s Booker-longlisted debut, Pearl, I was reminded of my great-aunt and the lethal comfort of a good story. The novel has…

By Maria Bregman Åsa Ericsdotter’s novel, Phase 3, is a book for a world that has lost the stomach for such work. It arrives packaged as…

By Maria Bregman I remember my first trip to Island. I was nineteen, on a layover, and my impression of the place was formed in…

By Maria Bregman I remember standing in a Gibert Jeune in Paris some years ago, faced with a wall of Michel Houellebecq’s work. The covers…

By Maria Bregman I remember the summer of 2017 with a peculiar clarity. Not for the political upheavals or any personal milestones, but for the…

By Maria Bregman I was at a book launch in Bloomsbury a few years back, the kind where the white wine is warm and the…

By Maria Bregman We are taught to admire the lifeboat. In the grand narrative of human suffering, particularly the systematised horror of the Blitz, the…

By Maria Bregman There is a moment of sublime, tragicomic misdirection at the heart of Eshkol Nevo’s novel Honeymoons. A wealthy American Jew, grieving his late…

By Maria Bregman Not long ago, I found myself at a dinner party in Islington, seated between a gallerist despairing over her Hinge profile and…