Luxury two-bedroom maisonette with French windows and space-saving spiral staircase. Unfurnished, but white goods included. Previous tenant stayed for two years, and the boiler was recently replaced. It’s unusual, for sure, to prefer the smell of long-gone student sweat to country air, but it takes all sorts. It really does…

I was on the train when I first noticed. A gentleman crammed into the aisle, too wiry to fill out his suit. He held a briefcase of the sort you don’t see so often nowadays. But he was young; perhaps the suitcase was a gift from his father. He was…

Reading that sentence is the first time I’ve seen the Covid-19 pandemic written about in the true past tense — historically. Quite literally, embedded into the narrative of a history book, with a neat start and end date, cemented, done and dusted. My first response was a thrill. There was…

It’s that time of year again where I preview all the films nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. Slightly after that time of year, actually, because I didn’t manage to get them all seen until the night of the ceremony, and then didn’t write down my thoughts. So…

I In the only home I have ever lived in, in the only bedroom I have ever known, sits the bed I have slept in every night since I was twelve years old. My father didn’t approve of spending money. He nailed together the headboard of my parents’ bed and…

As much as I like reading, it’s never going to be the first thing my brain wants to do at the end of a long day. Maybe it’s that way for some nerds, but it’s never been that way for me. This is especially true with the type of literary…

One of the more popular tropes I’m finding in my occasional voyages into literary fiction is the “purgatory journey.” This is nothing new, of course — Dante and the Ancient Greeks were quite into this sort of thing — but it’s definitely had an upsurge of late. Lincoln in the…

Ah! The twee middle class urban novel. I knew it from the minute I set eyes on this book and its cutesy cover design. We would be in comfortable WASPish ennui mode, following a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-weight (for relatability purposes, although the author is always stick thin) woman called something…

It’s that time of year again — the time when I walk into Waterstones and say, “Hi, yes, I used to work here many years ago. You might remember me. Please could I have half price on all six of the books shortlisted for the Booker prize?” And because Waterstones…