GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
The Boston Castrato
by Colin W Sargent
(Barbican Press £9.99)
TO SAY that The Boston Castrato is Colin W Sargent’s interpretation of the great American novel writ small is no criticism.
By focusing largely on a specific location in a single year, and compressing the narrative into less than 300 pages, Sargent amplifies the tumult of individual lives as a reflection of the dominating forces of migration, crime and cultural experimentation that define them.
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile


