I’ve not been recommending enough American authors, so here’s one to redress the balance a little. Karen Fowler isn’t only a resident of...

Midnight’s Children is a collage of liberated India in all its brilliance and messiness

Disbelieved: Skin and Bone CSIs is a change of pace for this newsletter. It‘s YA (young adult) fiction, young adult being a euphemism for...

I almost hesitate to recommend Birds Without Wings, it’s so long and stuffed full of so much history. But then I could say it’s...

The setting is Oxford and the year 1976. A magnet for me. I was living in Oxford during the long, hot summer of 1976. Recently I came...

In Piranesi you plunge into an alternative world through the journals of a character of such innocence you just want to hug him.

‘ “Where are you from?” Elif Shafak asked herself in a 2020 Vanity Fair article. “I am from multiple places. I come from memories and...

Leo the African, or Leo Africanus, is not a new book. It was first published in French in the nineteen-eighties and my British edition...

In 2012 a friend persuaded me to apply for the Tin House writers’ conference, because Paul Harding was leading a class on novel writing....

Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

I’ve recommended a number of different books in this newsletter so far and they’ve had one thing in common, they were fiction. Safe,...

If you’ve read the Iliad, and I know some of you have, you are going to enjoy this book. I can say that unreservedly. This is not Cliff...