JAMES WALSH recommends an exceptional documentary about the experience of Western doctors in Gaza
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Letters From Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Mexican Brenda Navarro and Argentinean Claudia Pineiro and of poetry by Nicaraguan-Costa Rican Lester Gomez Medina
CAREFUL CRAFTSMAN: Nicaraguan-Costa Rican writer Lester Gomez Medina
KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new panorama of world cinema The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
EMPTY HOUSES (Daunt Books, £9.99), Mexican writer Brenda Navarro’s first novel, is the devastating story of a mother who loses her small child in a playground somewhere in Mexico and her relentless search to find him.
It is also the story of a working-class woman who has kidnapped the child in order to fulfil her maternal desires and, fittingly, the chapters begin with epigraphs from the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska that set the tone for what it is yet to come.
The narrative alternates between the harrowing stories of these two desperate woman as they try to make sense of motherhood, mental and physical abuse and trauma in a novel that questions maternal instincts in patriarchies and the place of women in modern society.
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