‘How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House,’ by Cherie Jones, is a stunning debut
Rare is the first book that reveals the writer fully formed, the muscles and sinews of her sentences firm and taut, the voice distinctly her own — think Imbolo Mbue’s “Behold the Dreamers” or Casey Cep’s “Furious Hours.” But Cherie Jones’s lavish, cinematic debut, “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House,” rises to that high […]
The New York Times reviews Cherie Jones’ “dazzling” debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House
Welcome to Paradise — also known as Baxter’s Beach, the Caribbean resort village at the center of Cherie Jones’s dazzling debut novel, “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House.” The year is 1984, and the orphaned teenager Lala is being raised by her grandmother Wilma. The trouble in Paradise seems to be that men can’t […]
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford, review — the Golden Hill novelist on life after a V2 rocket
Francis Spufford’s dazzling debut novel, Golden Hill (2016), opened with a ship approaching colonial New York in November 1746 with seemingly interminable slowness. Light Perpetual, its keenly awaited successor, opens with a V2 rocket bomb approaching war-battered London in November 1944 with what seems unimaginable velocity. Detonating within a ten-thousandth of a second, it obliterates a Woolworths store, […]
Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke, review — “a beautiful, blistering account of a key moment in our history”
“It’s a horror show.” That’s what Rachel Clarke’s friend Arjun told her on March 13 last year. A doctor specialising in infectious diseases, he, like Clarke and all the doctors they knew, had been watching the government’s response to the newly declared pandemic with growing incredulity. Hospitals were already filling up. Patrick Vallance, the chief […]
The Observer’s 10 best debut novelists of 2021 features Natasha Brown and Ailsa McFarlane
We are delighted to see Natasha Brown and Ailsa McFarlane picked as two of The Observer’s 10 best debut novelists of 2021. This is the eighth year in which the New Review team has read through dozens of first novels, looking for books that leap out from the crowd, writers who speak with powerful, fresh voices. Click […]
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic review — teetering over the abyss
On a holiday in Provence, Luke proposes to Anya. Nothing about it is romantic — both seem wearily locked into the next step of their stagnating five-year relationship, trying to paper over the cracks even as the walls crumble around them. “The subject of our engagement quickly felt too awkward to return to,” Anya, our […]
Faber releases a trailer for Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
Light Perpetual, the critically-acclaimed new novel from Costa-winning author Francis Spufford, is out on Thursday 4th February. Click here to see the new trailer.
Bernardine Evaristo is interviewed in the Evening Standard
‘I want to be a role model,’ says Bernardine Evaristo emphatically. ‘And an inspiration. Because my background, it’s not, you know, a white background. It’s not upper-class; it’s not privileged; it’s not Oxbridge. I come from a large, working-class, mixed-race family growing up in suburbia. The things that have happened to my career this last year […]
‘NHS staff are burning with frustration and grief at this second wave’- Dr Rachel Clarke is interviewed in the Observer
You wrote Breathtakingtowards the start of the pandemic when you couldn’t sleep. Did you envisage that the world would still be looking the way it does almost a year later?No, I truly did not. I started writing the book as a forlorn kind of nocturnal therapy at a time when cases were going down, it was […]
Page refresh: how the internet is transforming the novel by Olivia Sudjic
Towards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could barely turn two pages before my hand moved reflexively toward the […]