LIterature Reviews

Re-reading The Great Gatsby felt like revisiting an experience that made a good impression on me first time round, only to find the new experience empty of pleasure, meaning or purpose. There are beautiful sentences, a blizzard of expensive…

From the opening dedication of her eight novel, Girl, Woman, Other, Anglo-Nigerian best-selling author Bernardine Evaristo, makes her intention of telling marginalised stories by usually overlooked minority groups clear:  For the sisters…

Reading can often have a serendipitous, almost conspiratorial feel to it - just as you begin reading about a topic, suddenly you notice it everywhere. It was there all along, of course, but you hadn’t yet thought to look for it - nor for…

Restless Souls is Dan Sheehan’s debut novel and it’s a bold experiment, straddling several genres and constantly confounding the reader’s expectations. At first you think it’s going to be a war junkie’s story from the 1990s siege of…

An accidental murder kicks off a crime fuelled chain of events that is both hilarious and heart breaking in Lisa McInerney’s roaring debut. At the centre of the interweaving narratives is the tough but troubled teenager Ryan Cusack. The…

Sarah Pinborough's 13 minutes; A book that makes me glad I was a complete dork in school. What can I say in this review without giving away all the twists and turns of Sarah Pinborough’s YA thriller, 13 Minutes. Its good, really good. Go…

 An unforgettable novel about the possibility of love. So says the blurb on the back of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Unforgettable, it is. This is a story of convergence and collision between two pairs of…

For five weeks in the run up to Christmas, Gimlet Media treated us to Homecoming, their first fictional podcast. At a time when almost half of Americans are at least aware of the podcast as a concept, Gimlet have been cornering the market.…

Dave Lordan is some cunt for writing this collection. And I mean that in the same way that Slippy-Sloppy would mean it. Slippy-Sloppy (a nickname for Stephen) was a bloke I used to work alongside in the Dunkin’ Donuts bakery in Cherry…

This book was so good that the first time I read it I forgot I was meant to be making notes, so I had to read it twice, which was totally fine as it was really very good. Then I read it a few more times just for fun. And then I took notes.…