Review by Jen Newby
Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet explodes the flat stereotypical characters that abound in modern fiction. Although Durrell wrote the quartet during the late fifties his writing remains undated. Vibrant characters writhe off the pages, and embed themselves into your mind, closer acquaintances than fictional constructs. You cannot forget Scobie, the decrepit cross-dressing [...]
Review by Natalie Clark
Endlessly falling in love with literary heroines is a guilty pleasure of mine and Amber in Ali Smith’s fantastic novel The Accidental provides a sustaining allure throughout this engaging novel. From the eponymous heroine of Anna Karenina to John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I have been provided with the perfect seductive [...]
Review by Linda Aloysius
In Morvern Callar, Alan Warner effectively updates the critique of femininity’s relation to commerce that Gustave Flaubert provided in Madame Bovary. This is a far from obvious update, but undeniable once seen.
Both heroines have potentially doomed, but differing, relationships with consumerism. Emma Bovary eventually dies through suicide induced by the [...]
Review by Oliver Redfern
The first edition of Captains of the Sands, published in 1937, was seized by the Brazilian government and burnt in public. Jorge Amado’s novel, depicting the story of street children in Brazil who rape, steal and kill (much like their future counterparts in Paulo Lins’ 1997 novel City of God) was an [...]
Review by Jen Glyn
Kelly Link has been getting rave reviews for years. The fact that she isn’t better known is probably the result of the British publishing industry’s squeamishness regarding short stories and science fiction (however literary or, in Link’s case, intelligent it is). Last year’s Nebula Awards (for science fiction [...]
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