‘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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]