Borges Marathon, Part 22: The Secret Miracle
My thoughts on "The Secret Miracle", a short story in which Jorge Luis Borges plays with time and causality.
Milkman by Anna Burns: Review
My thoughts on a Booker Prize winning novel about a teenage girl living in 1970s Belfast and struggling to survive in a claustrophobic community of rumour and suspicion.
Borges Marathon, Part 21: Death and the Compass
In this short story by Jorge Luis Borges, a detective tale becomes a labyrinth in which the usual crime fiction tropes are subverted.
The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin
A fascinating window into a difficult life. Richard Garay is a young gay man trying to find his way in Argentina after the death of his parents, navigating homophobia and dictatorship and the early days of AIDS among a myriad…
Borges Marathon, Part 19: The Shape of the Sword
With shifting narrators and a big twist at the end, this short story by Jorge Luis Borges tackles themes of violence, vengeance, the clash of theory and practice, and how we judge others.
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn
My take on the new novel by this Booker Prize winning author, in which the lives of a disparate set of characters suddenly intersect.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
My thoughts on Vincenzo Latronico's beautiful novel about millennial expats in Berlin, recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
What Is Literary Fiction Anyway?
Literary fiction is hard to define, but I'm going to try anyway. The debate tends to be poisoned by debates about elitism and being "better" than genre fiction, which I'd like to avoid here. Instead, I want to identify the…
Borges Marathon, Part 17: The Garden of Forking Paths
A pacy wartime thriller mixes with an abstract meditation on the forking paths of time and fate in a classic short story by Jorge Luis Borges.