Maybe, if we cry at books, we cry because we just don’t know what else to do.
Tag: books
New Statesman review: ‘Our Place’, Mark Cocker (Cape, 2018)
Cocker is an unlikely radical in some ways, but at bottom the book he’s written – however measured, equable and intelligent – is a call for revolution.
TLS review: ‘Ground Work’, Tim Dee ed. (Cape, 2018)
The weight of the prevailing aesthetic – today favouring the brooding and sublime, the sensitive, the straight-faced – is as heavy as ever.
New Statesman review: ‘Darker With The Lights On’, David Hayden (Little Island Press, 2018)
The framing of this debut collection by Dublin-born Hayden is insistently absurdist.
TLS review: ‘The Songs Of Trees’, David George Haskell (Viking, 2017)
For David George Haskell, the forest never really ends.
New Statesman review: ‘The Great Soul Of Siberia’, Sooyong Park, trans. Jamie Chang (William Collins, 2016)
There is more than one way to lose yourself in a forest. Keeping still – “as still and quiet as a tree” – will do the job as surely as stumbling mapless into the wild, to judge from Sooyong Park’s deceptively intense account of filming endangered Amur tigers in south-eastern Siberia.
New Humanist interview: Carys Bray
Carys Bray was born into a strict Mormon family in Southport, Merseyside. Her keenly anticipated first novel, A Song For Issy Bradley, tells the story of a Mormon family struggling to come to terms with the death of their youngest daughter, Issy.
Richard Smyth 