By Alexander Stone The Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival returns for its eighth year on Thursday 8 October, running four days through to Sunday 11…
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 Sara Bright Carys Davies’s historical novel, Clear, has won the main prize at the Wales Book of the Year awards. The news was shared by…
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 Alexander Stone We are drowning in data, yet thirsting for meaning. We live in an age of supposed perfect recall, our lives documented in…
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…