My review of Danny Boy by Barry Walsh, a novel of beautifully drawn relationships and the sometimes funny, sometimes painful experience of growing up on a council estate in 1960s London.
When I moved to New York City as a 22-year-old, I immediately loved the chaotic, frenetic energy of the place. I’d grown up in London, another big city, but this was something else. Manhattan seemed like a place where it…
What would a world with no objective reality look like? How about a language with no nouns? Jorge Luis Borges explores these ideas in a fascinating thought experiment.
I was surprised by Snow: it's very different from John Banville's usual style. There's some beautiful prose as usual, but in the end it's quite a formulaic detective novel.
"Captain Wildboar was his apt nickname in Megalokastro. With his sudden rages, his deep, dark, round eyes, his short, stubborn neck and that jutting fang, the heavy, broad-boned man was really like a wild boar, rearing for the spring."
The View From Belmont raises interesting questions of race and gender amid the barbarousness of a slave-owning society. The dual narrative was a promising technique, but it didn't feel fully realised to me. I'd have liked more of 1990s Trinidad…