How It All Began by Penelope Lively
Lives topple like dominoes in Penelope Lively's cunning new novelHow It All Began begins in uncharacteristically violent fashion: "The pavement rises up and hits her. Slams into her face, drives the lower rim of her glasses into her cheek." Charlotte, ...
Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin
By Alfred HicklingKyung-Sook Shin's tale of an elderly woman who goes missing on the Seoul underground has hit a nerve, winning the Man Asian literary prize and selling more than 2m copies in South Korea. It certainly taps the universal tendency to tak...
I Have Waited and You Have Come by Martine McDonagh – review
By Alfred HicklingA bleak prediction of the consequences of rising sea levels, McDonagh's book is set in a nightmare vision of Cheshire in the not-too-distant future: "When we first came here the golf course was a progression of green velvet swirls. La...
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce – review
A Bunyanesque allegory inspired by lossNot much ever happens to Harold Fry, a former brewery manager who lives in comfortable retirement in a neat little suburb on the south coast. It takes an unexpected letter to spur him out of his chair. Queeni...
The White Shadow by Andrea Eames
By Alfred HicklingEames's novel opens arrestingly in the carcass of an elephant, where a young, half-crazed Zimbabwean boy named Tinashe takes refuge during the country's second war of independence: "I don't know what I expected to find inside the elep...
The Hound of the Baskervilles – review
Lawrence Batley, HuddersfieldThis version of Conan Doyle's classic is an enlightened, if somewhat unexpected, collaboration between one of the North West's oldest theatrical institutions, Oldham Coliseum, which is currently under renovation; and one of...
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles – review
A satire on minimalist decor with a minimalist plot to matchA certain Swedish furniture giant recently ran a TV ad in which dozens of cats went walkabout in a Wembley superstore. The implication seemed to be that nothing soothes the feline soul so much...
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – review
Royal Exchange, ManchesterWe tend to think of lad culture as a relatively new phenomenon. Yet before there was Nuts magazine, before there was Oasis, before there was even rock'n'roll, there were desperate, directionless young men like Arthur Seat...
The War Tour by Zoe Lambert
By Alfred HicklingLambert's collection of war stories presents a carefully balanced picture of the world's combat zones, with Tutsi reportage presented alongside Hutu, or a Bosnian's remembrance pitched against a Serb's. The writing is disarmingly plai...
The Diary of Anne Frank – review
Theatre Royal, YorkAnne Frank expressed a desire for immortality through her writing; though you sometimes wonder what she would have made of the kind of immortality she has achieved. In the past couple of years she has been posted on YouTube, had a ve...
Angus, Thongs and Even More Snogging – review
West Yorkshire Playhouse, LeedsFor anyone who has neither been, nor parented, a teenage girl over the past 10 years, Georgia Nicholson is the creation of teen fiction author Louise Rennison, whose first novel, Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging so...
The Foundling by Agnès Desarthe, translated by Adriana Hunter – review
By Alfred HicklingJerome is a divorced 56-year-old estate agent living in a small northern French town who likes to go rolling in the woods: "I often have to go deep into the forest … I need to smell, I run, roll into a ball, lie out flat, resti...
