CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Sci-fi reviews with Mat Coward: October 2024
From the conundrums of a parallel London to a rewilding project in rural Ireland via a disturbing post-plagues world mystery thrives
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
I’M NOT sure the Guild of Literary Critics include it in their list of approved descriptions, but really, “gorgeous” is the only word that makes sense of Alan Moore’s The Great When (Bloomsbury, £20).
It’s one of those lavish cakes of a book which is so full of plums — hilarious and horrific, touching and obscene, surreal and familiar — that you can’t help gorging yourself on it.
It belongs to the small but much-loved subgenre of “hidden London” fantasies, in which another version of the city overlaps or intersects with the one we know.
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