It has been AGES and that wasn’t my intention. Life has been busy and tiring of late, with a real mix of good and not-so-good things. Accompanying me through it all have – of course &#8…

It has been AGES and that wasn’t my intention. Life has been busy and tiring of late, with a real mix of good and not-so-good things. Accompanying me through it all have – of course &#8…

Stephen Benatar’s remarkable, deeply unsettling novel features one of the best depictions of the inner life of an unstable woman I’ve ever encountered in fiction. There’s a long tradition of female…

I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed &#82…

I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed &#82…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

It’s episode 24 of the podcast I do with my twin brother, and as always we cover all the most important issues of the day. Enjoyyyy

For Women in Translation month, I pulled Deborah (1936) by Esther Kreitman, translated from Yiddish by her son, Maurice Carr, in the 1940s. It was a gift from a Virago-loving friend called Alex bac…

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently involved in books which deal with the horrors of the 20th century; maybe it’s a reaction to what’s happening in our current world where it se…

From the last days of the Titanic to desperate romantics, we rate the work of a British master of black comedy

A couple of years ago, I read The Visitors, Mary McMinnies’ extremely good, extremely long novel about British government officials and their wives working and living in a thinly disguised Kr…

Those of you who follow Paula’s Book Jotter blog will know what a huge fan she is of Finnish author Tove Jansson, creating the wonderful resource Tove Trove. When Paula pointed out 9 August was Tov…

I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in…

I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in…

Any regular reader of Stuck in a Book between 2009 and 2013 will know that I was busy doing a DPhil in English literature, but I can never remember how much I wrote about it here. That’s part…