“Maybe This Time” by Alois Hotschnig
I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who's looking for something a little weird and disturbing and different.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This book has simple sentences like this scattered through it.…
“The Generation Game” by Sophie Duffy
An interesting premise: the book starts with a woman in hospital talking to her newborn baby girl. She starts to tell the…
Why I like independent bookshops
You often hear people talking about supporting independent bookshops as if they’re some charity case. I don’t agree with this – they…
London rioting
I live in Haringay, the same borough as Tottenham, where the riots started that have since spread across London. If you take…
“Book of Clouds” by Chloe Aridjis
A very quiet, meditative book about a Mexican woman adrift in Berlin. Tatiana is alienated from her family and her friends, cut off from the rest of the…
“Brenton Brown” by Alex Wheatle
Brenton Brown is a follow-up to Alex Wheatle’s famous debut Brixton Rock, which was set in the early 1980s. We catch up…
Booker longlist
Here are the 13 longlisted books for this year’s Man Booker Prize: Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape –…
Apocalypse
I like it when fiction writers have something to say about the world. I mean the real world, beyond the world of…