Given the interviews Rupert Thompson has given recently to promote Secrecy, he well knows he’s something of an under-celebrated novelist, a treat for the cognoscenti yet largely unknown beyond his fan base. Despite producing over a twenty-five year period a brace of perfectly formed and unsettling novels, like Dreams of Leaving, The Insult and The…
Posted on 15th May 2013
Posted on 28th May 2012
Glister
John Burnside’s soaring reputation as a poet and memoirist often overshadows his parallel career as a writer of dark and unsettling novels. Glister, his seventh, has as its backdrop the sort of isolated, left-behind provincial town Burnside has explored before in The Dumb House and The Mercy Boys. The town here has only two districts,…
Posted on 7th April 2011
The Space Between Things
Slacker poet Arch, the protagonist of The Space Between Things, has knocked around Birmingham’s independent publishing scene for as long as Charlie Hill himself—he first appeared in 1999, when he narrated A Good Age in Tindal Street’s Hard Shoulder anthology. Given that both character and creator have a history of roughing it in low-quality accommodation…
Posted on 31st January 2011
And This Is True
Emily Mackie’s debut novel is a hybrid of doomed love story and disorientating rite-of-passage. Fifteen-year old Neville Gow has spent eleven years living in his father Marshall’s van as they journey round Britain while Marshall works, fruitlessly it seems, on a series of novels. When Neville tries to kiss his father, Marshall stops their wanderings….
