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.
Borges Marathon, Part 16: The Library of Babel
An infinite library of every possible book sounds wonderful until you contemplate the realities of it, which Jorge Luis Borges does masterfully in "The Library of Babel".
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Why was I disappointed by a novel that everyone else seems to love? Follow me as I try to find the answers.
Review: 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy
A Malaysian debut novelist combines a contemporary love story with a historical narrative of Japanese occupation. I enjoyed one much more than the other, but would recommend it nonetheless.
Borges Marathon, Part 14: The Lottery in Babylon
How do you explain the effects of random chance? Borges invented an all-powerful Lottery governing all possible events in life to help us think through it.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld: Review
My review of a beautifully dark and thought-provoking new piece of literary fiction by Evie Wyld, set between a remote Australian outback village haunted by terrible memories and a London flat inhabited by a disgruntled ghost.
The Future by Naomi Alderman
What kind of future do we want? How would it look if it was based on trust instead of fear? For a novel that starts with the end of the world, The Future has a lot of interesting things to…