Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but … More
Category: Fiction
The book closed, the world continues
The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling … More
A cautionary elegy
William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard … More
Fear of the unknown
I only ever read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a haphazard manner, and my familiarity with his oeuvre has owed as … More
Traces of lives on geographies
I’ve been skirting around W.G. Sebald for years. I read The Rings of Saturn, as I suspect many people have … More
A humane document
Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should … More
Sculpted in the clay of language
Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he … More
