CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Crime fiction with Mat Coward: August 23, 2023
An impertinent detective, bereavement and vengeance in New York, an eye on the Lakes, and a Welsh Blair Witch
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
THE GOOD LIARS by Anita Frank (HQ, £16.99) takes place a couple of years after the end of World War I, when the Stilwells of Darkacre Hall can only dream of the life they knew before.
Once respected and deferred to, today they are openly shunned by the villagers. They live a lifeless existence, bound to each other by shameful secrets and mutual mistrust.
The difficulty of hiring servants means they are even reduced to answering their own doorbell — an especially distasteful task when the visitor is a detective asking impertinent questions about the summer of 1914.
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