ESG are one of those NYC no-wave post-punk bands who I heard on John Peel sometime in the early 1980s and never forgot, and until Universal Sound released an ESG compilation, A South Bronx Story, an obscure band not represented in my record collection. Ob…

As a confirmed city dweller, I’m quite often overwhelmed in the countryside. Overwhelmed in parts of Devon where huge hedges and foliage blot out the modern world, to the extent that Tess Durbeyfield might appear in the next field. Or in a thicket of tree…

The debut novel from Katie Bishop is split over two time lines. In the past, 17-year-old Rachel spends her time travelling with a friend. They land on an idyllic Greek island and decide to stay, mainly because an older man, Alistair, starts to show an int…

If you’re familiar with the work of Raphael Bob-Waksberg, it’s probably the critically acclaimed show Bojack Horseman, an animated comedy-drama about a has-been sitcom actor who struggles with depression and alcoholism. Oh, and the actor is a horse. The m…

Cast your mind back, if you will, to those grim days of the first lockdown. While we were all distracting ourselves baking dodgy sourdough, doing star jumps along with Joe Wicks and gaping aghast at Joe Exotic et al on Netflix, Ellie Cooper was having arg…

Luna is a smart trans woman, living in New York: great friends; a chef roommate. When she is unexpectedly fired, she has money worries. And that is the only reason she starts a fake relationship with the French heir to culinary royalty. Jean-Pierre needs …

Africa is made up of 54 countries, so the term “African music” is an obvious misnomer. The continent is home to a myriad of distinct musical genres, one of which is Kuduro which came out of Luanda – the capital of Angola – in the late 1980s and early 1990…

Sometimes three hundred words or so isn’t enough, I mean where do you start with a memoir (anti-memoir) which references everything from the healing power of walking/climbing in The Peak District to ‘the zen of the Weird’. Tbh, I knew I was going to be on…

I know almost nothing about the film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and what I do know seems to have come to me via some kind of osmosis - maybe just possessing copies of City Limits and Time Out during their heyday was enough to give me the odd fading…

Is there really a need for yet another book about Factory records? Well, yes, there is, because as one of the interviewees in I Thought I Heard You Speak says, “The women running Factory didn’t get the credit they deserved. They didn’t get any credit for …

The Mass-Observation project was set up in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life. Hundreds of people maintained diaries, replied to questionnaires, or anonymously jotted down people’s conversations and behaviour. In Claire McGlasson’s excellent sec…

A raw and slightly terrifying portrayal of new motherhood, The Nursery charts the first week of a new-born’s life from inside a suffocating New York City apartment. While there are so many things we avoid talking about when it comes to birth and parenting…

Hannah Hoare's debut novel takes you to a dystopian future where both science and religion are equally distrusted. Seventeen-year-old Katrina arrives in California hoping to finally find her people. Raised on the Island by her father and brother, she has …

“I’ve tried several times to understand why Father McMahon left the Real Life in England – of potatoes and sleek roads and nine degrees Celsius – for this shithole.” That’s fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza, and “the shithole” he’s referring to is Nigeria, wh…

How can you survive the loss of a loved one? How can you reconcile your love with the complex relationship you had? And how can you hold onto your identity now that they’re gone? We all experience grief at one point or another, and if that time has alread…

Okay - here’s one obvious example (and there are many) just after David Bowie died, I was frustrated I couldn’t seem to find any music writing that gave another (less male) view of Bowie and brought a different perspective to the men only hagiography fest…

You don’t necessarily want to become immersed in the tight-knit, hard scrabble world of Lisa Pike’s stories but you can’t help yourself. The women narrators pulling you in despite your best efforts to shield yourself from the kind of stuff you’d rather no…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a book called ‘Collected Works’ was, well, someone’s entire oeuvre, especially a book as hefty as this – honestly, it’s big enough to knock a horse out. But ‘Collected Works’ is actually Lydia Sandgren’s astonishing deb…

Sarah Penner scored a big success with her debut novel ‘The Lost Apothecary’, a rollicking tale of vengeance set partly in the hidden depths of eighteenth-century London. The follow-up – a stand-alone work – is set in 1873 with the action kicking off in P…

When I saw ‘My Body’ on the display table of a bookshop, I’m not proud of my immediate reaction. Great, I thought, this beautiful model has written a novel about why catering to the male gaze is feminist after all. My assumption of this woman’s thoughts a…

It’s easy to forget that two years ago, most of us would have done absolutely anything to be out in the world — it’s something I try to remember as I avoid sharing oxygen with fifty people on the tube. Ana Kinsella’s debut is a love letter to city life, p…

Marra is the youngest daughter of the Queen of a small Kingdom. Her older sister was married to the Prince of the neighbouring country to prevent war. When Marra realises the Prince is more monster, she also discovers being a Princess does not necessarily…

I prefer a short story that doesn’t have a trick in the tail, a point, some final boom-tish (boom-tosh) and wends its way somewhere interesting, delivering an emotional punch without the clunky use of smoke and mirrors. Luckily the clear-eyed and elegant …

Since publishing ‘The Man on the Street’ back in 2020, local author Trevor Wood has lit up the thriller scene. That book went on to nab the coveted CWA New Blood Dagger, as well as the CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Novel of the Year gong. It was also shortli…

There is something about Richard Cabut’s Disorderly Magic & Other Disturbances that transported the long coat back to London in the early eighties, wandering, walking, dreaming and, more prosaically, praying for delivery of the Thursday morning dole chequ…

The people of the Islets, a long-forgotten roaming Edenic archipelago, need help so an agent of the Nation, Hester Heller, is sent out by her abusive controller to investigate. Under the cover of a tour with her band she’s able to visit cities and intervi…

Mark A. Radcliffe’s Three Gifts is a life affirming pleasure much like his first two novels, the Not the Booker Prize long-listed Gabriel’s Angel (published by Blue Moose in 2010) and Stranger Than Kindness (2013). Thankfully the intervening years don’t s…

Nicole Flattery first hovered onto my radar when her debut short story collection ‘Show Them A Good Time’ came out back in 2020. A caustically funny and irreverent series of tales, full of sharply drawn characters, it was a calling card that announced an …

Occasionally I’ll read a book so universal that I recommend it to pretty much anyone who will listen. ‘Educated’ is a memoir that I’ve bought over and over as a present for people in my life because Westover’s story is one that everyone needs to read. Rai…

“Picture that weird and wonderful transition from night to day. Simultaneously slow and sudden. The orphic moment where the early morning resembles the dusk. The way dew-dropped spiderwebs hang undisturbed under the shade of snapdragon pods. The little tr…

Henry Kimball was once a teacher. Then a cop. He’s now a private detective. When an ex-pupil of his comes into his office one day, she tells him she strongly suspects that her husband has been cheating on her with someone he works with, but wants confirma…

During the miserable winter months, I think it’s natural to be jealous of animals that hibernate. Why can’t we cosy ourselves away, ignore work and escape the cold weather for a few months? Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel follows a woman who does just tha…

Blake Morrison’s memoirs have a habit of grabbing you by the throat and not letting go. His latest, Two Sisters, is as compulsive as And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, but its grip is just that bit tighter and despe…

I dunno, I might be wrong, but I think I saw Clio Barnard, Sam Shepard and Ryan Bingham watching over me when I started writing the review of this book. Well, maybe I didn’t, but there’s elements of all these equine greats in this novel, based on transcri…

“Most of the world believes, and has always believed, in some sort of divine being or beings, whether that’s a single, omniscient God, or many gods in complicated pantheons, or localized nature deities. But the number of people who had grown up believing …

US author Lisa Unger has won a big following among fans of twisty psychological novels (her ‘In the Blood’ won the prestigious Silver Falchion Award for Best Crime Thriller in 2015). Her latest is a standalone work and it fits neatly into the sub-genre: C…

To say I love The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s first novel which is not to be confused with the Russian classic by Dostoevsky, would be a huge understatement. The story of Selin, a young Turkish-American woman starting at Harvard, fell into my hands the summer a…

The millennial life guru Dolly Alderton is back with a collection of wisdom from her Sunday Times column Dear Dolly. Covering a range of topics from unrequited love to dealing with friends that won’t cough up their share of the bill, this book offers clea…

Even if a writer’s words “wound or stab us” or amount to “sabotage and subversion” is bearing witness enough? It’s this doubt that partly informs Ferit Edgü’s The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (translated superbly into English for the first time by Aron A…

Alex Niven’s fascinating new book ‘The North Will Rise Again’ looks at the history of modernism in the north, charting its rise and fall and issuing a call to arms for its return. Pop art began in New York, right? Wrong! There’s a case to be made for Newc…

You know the kind of book I mean. The kind of book published in hardback that you’ve decided you won’t buy until it’s published in paperback. That kind of book. That sits there in the bookshop in all its arrogant, hardbackness. Constantly wheedling. Go on…

This anthology of short stories features nine tales of wartime, each with one vital element changed. The writers explore how a new technology, or magic, or even sentient emus, would have changed the course of these historical moments. Alternate history is…

I suppose I should say Blixa Bargeld, lead singer of Einstürzende Neubauten, was my favourite Bad Seed. Well, I say my favourite Bad Seed, but what about Barry Adamson and Anita Lane? Okay, let’s start again - my third favourite Bad Seed, who’s “semi fict…

Northern Irish writer Adrian McKinty made his name writing a series of novels featuring detective Sean Duffy – a detective and Catholic living in a Protestant-dominated area. Set during The Troubles, the books saw McKinty nominated for a clutch of awards …

“I felt we were better than the other students from the start, even before I knew how much Tabitha had planned for us.” That’s Clare, the protagonist of Heather Darwent’s debut novel, talking about The Shiver – a name she’s given to a particular clique of…

If you’re in the market for a beguiling slice of whimsy, then can I point you in the direction of the new book from Max Cameron: ‘Traffic Cones Of Japan’. I’ve never thought about traffic cones. I mean, not even slightly. But Max Cameron has. I mean, he’s…

In May 2020, Hargreaves lockdown took him to interesting places; he “decided to print of out detailed maps of four US states, take out my red pen, and destroy them.” So began the world of Eyes on the Blue Star, a debut novel set in post-apocalyptic Americ…

At home and school Lea Ypi is taught to believe that “socialism brings freedom”. Even though her family are victims of socialism. However, after Albanian style socialism is overthrown and family secrets necessarily emerge, a new kind of freedom is promise…

Alexandra Benedict won plenty of plaudits last year for her festive puzzler ‘The Christmas Murder Game’, which nicely revamped the classic country house mystery. And it looks like she’s trying to corner the yuletide murder market as her latest is another …

This is a newly expanded edition of a book that was originally published in 1985. It was the first account of the New Pop phenomenon, a loose movement of sorts that encompassed bands such as Culture Club, ABC, Haircut 100, Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, …

Set in the fifties, Small Pleasures follows Jean, an unmarried newspaper journalist who lives with her reclusive, elderly mother. When her newspaper receives a letter from a woman claiming her daughter was the result of a virgin birth, Jean is assigned to…

Ambitious, bold and original, Assembly is easily the best novel I’ve read this year. The narrator, a Black British woman, is playing the game, attempting to assimilate at her high-paying finance job and among her white boyfriend’s wealthy family. But when…

Sangeeta Mulay's debut novel, set in India, explores two families with opposing political views as they try to navigate the shifting tides of India's changing political landscape. Aparna is a rationalist and an athiest, a determined campaigner against sup…

An outsider because of her nationality, her gender and her increasing feelings of jealousy towards her son’s classmate, Madame Akli’s notebooks become a way of trying to interrogate her dislocation from life in Algiers in the late seventies. Increasingly …