ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
Latest editorial
The writing's on the wall
CALUM BARNES recommends a novel about a graffiti enthusiast decoding the signs of the times during the 1965 Watts riots
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
Graffiti Palace
by AG Lombardo
(Serpent's Tail, £14.99)
“A RIOT is the language of the unheard,” Martin Luther King once famously remarked and in Graffiti Palace AG Lombardo concerns himself with the language of those unheard during the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles.
The novel's protagonist Americo Monk finds himself on the opposite side of town when the riots break out and it's through his peregrinations that we experience the maelstrom of those febrile August days.
Similar stories
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
JULIA THOMAS unpicks the mental processes that explain why book-to-film adaptations so often disappoint