The Body of the Thing is Karishma Jobanputra’s first collection of short stories, centred on women’s relationships, conscious and subconscious, with their bodies. Her writing is crisp a…

I bought This Is Grime after reading Jeffrey Boakye’s Hold Tight. I wanted to learn more about grime and its origins, and this oral history of the music genre and subculture is held up as the…

This Slavery is the third graphic novel adaptation I’ve read by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard, and the second of theirs I’ve read this year. It’s an adaptation of Ethel Carnie Holds…

Salt Lick is the second novel by contemporary fiction writer Lulu Allison. It is a warning to who we are now about what is coming next. In a near future that feels like only a few years away, the e…

These two beautiful books by Emma Cunningham, an artist and print maker specialising in illustration, are published by Design For Today. I pre-ordered Great Barfield Forever, which is officially pu…

Linea Axelsson’s prize-winning verse novel Ædnan, translated by Saskia Vogel, is an epic tale of the Sámi people of Northern Europe. Starting in 1913 and moving forward to 2016, it charts the…

Writing for Mass Observation You can apply to write for the archive here. Current Observers If you are one of our current Observers you may find our handbook for new Observers helpful. This has all th...

A long time ago, in another job, I looked after a small collection of Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters to Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, whose family owned the Gawthorpe estate in Padiham, Lancashir…

The second collection of short stories from Tom Cox, Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood, is an eclectic mix of flash fiction and longer form pieces of writing that share no genre…

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is a collection from a writer I haven’t read before. Banu Mushtaq has worked as a lawyer and a journalist, and as an author was a member of the Bandaya Sahitya mo…

This Part is Silent is SJ Kim’s first book and collects together her experiences of different silences she has encountered in the world. On its cover, it bears the Korean Hangul character jeo…

The Roof Beneath Their Feet tells the story of the inhabitants of Laburnum House, a former 18th century bankers’ house that sheltered rebels in 1857 and freedom fighters in 1942, and is now h…

Bert: Postcards from Labrador is described as a novelisation rather than a memoir by its author Philip Birch. It read more like a fictionalised memoir to me. Birch is the grandson of its subject an…

Woman, Idle is Laura Vogt’s third novel, and her second to be translated into English. I read and loved What Concerns Us and had no hesitation in buying Woman, Idle as soon as it was announce…

Which of the Australian bloggers I follow persuaded me in 2018 to buy a copy of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, I wonder. I know it must be someone Australian, because Shokoofeh Azar&#8217…