The image of the father in this story, unable to sleep, counting his sons-in-law instead of sheep, makes me smile. The way that he matches his memory of their faces with the litany of names, his uncertainty about the fifth, his debates over which of them is married to
Days and days throughout this July have contained book after book after book: a swell of print. From graphic novels (revisiting the Game of Thrones saga in this medium) to short stories (lots of those!), from memoirs (I’ve just finished Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing All the Way to the Mosque) to
Have Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird and Ghalib Islam's debut novel met? Were they caught up together in an air-raid shelter, sharing the same transistor radio while the sirens howled? "Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for him to tell the story. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what century
Setting Mary Swan's novella The Deep alongside her recent novel My Ghosts, the blues in their covers are rich and varied. The cover of one features statuary, a feminine form, opaque but graceful; the cover of the other showcases a butterfly, luminescent and fragile. They seem to intertwine. And one
Jami Attenberg’s novel is about what we wrap up. The cover of The Middlesteins appears to be a fast-food burger wrapper: quintessentially flavourful but fleeting. Edie’s mother watches Edie’s father’s heart beat beneath the skin of his chest. Edie notices the bones at the top of her chest, poking out like
