Books

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Lucy Hunter

Mary Shelley, at the age of 21, published what is arguably the first science fiction novel; a fantasy story with a scientific rather than supernatural explanation. Shelley had apparently heard of recent experiments to “reanimate” corpses by making them jerk around with electric shocks, and dreamed Read more...

The Editor

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Josef Alton

Tales of obsession never lose their appeal. If there is a character’s flawed logic, actions ignited by the flame of desperation, and the smell of blood disrupting the logical flow of common sense, we the readers love to wait for the eventual calamity. Samuel Dansam’s The Editor reads like an Read more...

Bel Canto

Posted 1:24pm Sunday 19th May 2013 by Tess Ritchie

I missed my bus stop twice reading this book – which really is a fair indication of how hooked you get. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto draws you in just as its heroine, soprano Roxanne Coss, captures her audience and the entire cast. Reading this novel, I was immediately reminded of E. L. Doctorow’s Read more...

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Posted 2:26pm Sunday 12th May 2013 by David McKenzie

Thomas Mann’s production of such an intricate, thought-provoking work as The Magic Mountain is a monumental achievement matched only by that of the casual reader actually managing to finish it. You not only need time to get through its 700 pages, but also a large amount of mental energy. Read more...

Mrs Dalloway

Posted 4:00pm Sunday 5th May 2013 by Feby Idrus

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway begins like this: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This opening sentence is about as simple as this book gets. From here, we are plunged headfirst into this swirling, teeming-with-life ocean of a book. At its most basic, Mrs Dalloway is a Read more...

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Posted 3:14pm Sunday 28th April 2013 by Harriet Hughes

Francie Nolan is growing in Brooklyn, like a tree, constantly in search of light… The tree in her backyard struggles to plant its roots, yet it continues to grow… Shit, that is a cheesy metaphor. But this book is far from cheesy. It is the turn of the twentieth century, and Francie Nolan Read more...

The Sun Also Rises

Posted 5:13pm Sunday 21st April 2013 by Madeline Sherwood King

Not much happens in The Sun Also Rises. It’s the 1920s. Four men and one woman visit Spain to see the bulls, and then they go home again. During their stay in Spain, it becomes apparent that all four men love the woman, but she falls in love with a guy who loves bulls. One particularly brutish man Read more...

Mefisto by John Banville

Posted 5:49pm Sunday 14th April 2013 by Lucy Hunter

What would you sacrifice to have everything you ever wanted? What happens if you sell your soul, but there is no afterlife to suffer in? John Banville recreates Goethe’s Mephistopheles in twentieth-century Ireland, bringing the old religious parable into a modern, secular setting, where God and the Read more...

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Posted 4:40pm Sunday 7th April 2013 by Thomas Thomson

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s latest novel. Relax. Concentrate … Let the world around you fade.” So begins Italo Calvino’s masterful, polyphonic novel If on a winter’s night a traveller. Published in 1979, self-referential and perfectly postmodern, this book is an examination Read more...

On the Road

Posted 6:30pm Sunday 24th March 2013 by Josef Alton

In the autumn of 1957, Jack Kerouac picked up an early edition of the New York Times from an all-night newsstand in the Upper West Side, Manhattan and read Gilbert Millstein’s review of On the Road. Millstein declared the novel “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important Read more...