AUS Paperback (2002)
The Messenger is a writer’s book at heart. While the plot is original and amusing, what I enjoyed most was Australian author Markus Zusak’s playful walk along ...
What really changes our way of appreciating and consuming culture, however, is the concept of time, which has changed over the decades. On one end there’s “Tarkovsky-time”, and on the ...
UK Hardback (Jun 2012)
“What is it called when the landscape mirrors the condition of the poor fucks who live in it?“
Ben Marcus is not a novelist but he is ...
UK Paperback (2012)
A middle-aged man, recently separated from his wife, stands alone on the deck of a North Sea ferry on his way to a walking holiday in Germany. ...
UK Paperback (Apr 2012)
I’ll admit it. The last time I visited Achilles and the Trojan War wasn’t in Homer’s The Iliad; it was in Troy—that golden, glinting Hollywood creation ...
UK hardback cover
About half way through Stuart Evers’s cinematic debut, If This is Home, it becomes clear that the author has pulled one over us: this is not only ...
A retrospective of Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and Status Anxiety as a tie-in to Litro #115: Work.
UK hardback cover
Why aren’t more short stories about happiness? Writers are a grim bunch, by and large. If there’s a slough of misery they can send their characters into, ...
UK paperback cover
There’s an art to ending a short story. A good finish leaves you feeling it was there all along, its signature running through everything like the words ...
1964 UK First Edition by Jonathan Cape
Hemingway is used as a barometer for the manly or literary class. He is everywhere, his name employed as an easy endorsement. In ...
UK 2001 paperback
“The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here-and-now. ...
1985 mass market paperback
There is a small collection of books that nearly everyone of a certain age has read by virtue of them being on the GCSE English reading ...
2011 paperback cover
The follow up to 2008’s acclaimed Submarine, Joe Dunthorne’s second novel, Wild ...
Soft-back cover for Kurt Cobain – The Journals
It’s puzzling whether it is even morally justifiable to read Kurt Cobain’s journals. Publishers appeared ...
Hardback cover
Jane Struthers’ Red Sky at Night is a delightful compendium of countryside wisdom. Filled with fascinating facts, it covers such things as predicting the weather prediction, reading tea leaves ...
Published by Headline Review
Moving and bitterly sweet, The Hand That First Held Mine is Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel and winner of the 2010 Costa novel award. Exposing the fragile nature ...
Eugene McCabe, author of Death and Nightingales.
When the Guardian recently ran a series of podcasts celebrating the short story, Chekov, Ballard, Hemingway, Carver all predictably featured. It was Eugene McCabe’s ...
Shark, by Wes Brown. Published by Horn Dog.
This debut novel from Wes Brown is very much of its time and place. Pervaded by Yorkshire grit, Northern realism ...
They gather on the houseboat. The water pipe makes its way around the circle of people, the drug a withdrawal from the business of life. Yet Mahfouz ...
Say the name “Philippa Gregory” and one immediately thinks of tightly laced corsets, the corrugated lace of magnificently decorative ruffs, cunning plots and manipulative manoeuvres in the dangerous arena of ...