Seven diverse short stories that plumb the depths of human experience. I love them all. ‘Why My Hair is Long’ ‘If my mother had called me and asked, “What have I done that you can’t forget?” I would have said, “I can forgive anything.” But she never called and that is what I can never forget.’
These poems offered warm lights and pools of delight in the second half of 2022. ‘At Springbrook’ by Sarah Holland-Batt I carry in heartwood for the stove. / When I swing open its glass door / a greying bee falls from the grate. / Tufted with ash, it moves ponderously / as though each of
Summer time is reading time! Stock up on these gems before Christmas and you’ll sail into Summer-reading bliss. Happening by Annie Ernaux – ‘I began writing in my diary every evening – the word NOTHING.’ In Happening the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature winner recounts how life-changing it was in 1963 to have an unwanted pregnancy. Superb. Small Things Like These by
‘Having a chronic condition is not akin to death,’ writes Heather Rose in her new memoir in essays Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. ‘It’s like living with a house guest who never leaves. Sometimes they mess the place up big time.’ Rose, the award-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny, has ankylosing spondylitis, which
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