The publication of Holly Pester’s debut novel is well timed: the tale of one young woman’s precarious experience of subletting comes in the midst of the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.
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The crazy cat lady is a cautionary tale”, writes Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in her absorbing, often amusing memoir.
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A couple of dozen pages into Nicole Flattery’s poised debut novel, the protagonist, seventeen-year-old Mae, is riding the escalators in a department store.
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When Eileen Agar was ten, she and her family travelled from Argentina to England, “accompanied by a cow and an orchestra to provide them with fresh milk and music”.
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It is the 2030s and Ramsgate is mostly inhabited by women; the third and fourth waves of a new virus have killed a disproportionate number of men.
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The mostly young women in Clare Sestanovich’s pithy first collection of short stories are drifting, with “nonspecific” jobs, “mild” preferences, and “vague” creative ambition.
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Jessie Greengrass’s absorbing debut novel, Sight, began with an unnamed narrator telling us she was pregnant and ended with her giving birth. In her even more absorbing second novel, The High House, we find ourselves once again waiting for waters to break, although in this case it is the waves that rise and roil.
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It takes confidence to write about something as undramatic as the postal service – a confidence that struts across the page in Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent novel to appear in English.
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The latest novel by the writer and musician Jenny Hval is a bubbling cauldron of chaos, as surreal and skewed as her debut, Paradise Rot.
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When Rachel Cohen was a child, she tried to etch her future self in her mind. “I hoped, when I grew older, I would be able to somehow come back and revisit this version of myself and tell her what had happened.”
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There is a confidence that comes from being a part of a larger whole. And yet, group membership invites invidious comparisons: who’s getting it right?
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As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children.
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