Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford – review
Nancy Mitford honed her satirical edge with this witty spy story written in the first days of the second world warThis novel opens with the declaration of the second world war, but Mitford completed it by Christmas 1939. Her frivolous confection was no...
Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey – review
Peter Toohey's study of tedium and ennui is amusing and instructiveIt's a brave author who chooses boredom as the subject for a book. How to describe this least glamorous of emotions, or delve into its essential qualities, without concocting a truly du...
A Simple Story by Leonardo Sciascia – review
Leonardo Sciascia is by turns polemic and playful in this brace of short storiesNovelist, essayist and radical politician Leonardo Sciascia was known during his lifetime as the "conscience of Italy" for his unflinching censure of Italian society, its l...
My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose, translated by Arunava Sinha – review
Buddhadeva Bose's story in which men waiting for a train recall their past loves loses something in translationOne of Bengal's foremost writers of the 20th century – widely considered second only to Rabindranath Tagore – Buddhadeva Bose produced mo...
Patronage by Maria Edgeworth – review
Published a year after Pride and Prejudice, Maria Edgeworth's 1814 epic deserves rediscoveryShe may have influenced Sir Walter Scott and Ivan Turgenev, and been a high-profile activist for the famine-stricken Irish during her lifetime, but Maria Edgewo...
The Extra Mile: A 21st Century Pilgrimage by Peter Stanford – review
This tour of Britain's most ancient religous sites is a triumphPeter Stanford, author of Heaven: A Traveller's Guide to the Undiscovered Country, is in slightly less celestial surroundings in The Extra Mile, wherein he travels to some of the most famed...
The City & the City by China Miéville | Book review
China Miéville is partial to a fabricated city setting, and he has outdone himself here by constructing two adjoining Eastern European city-states, Beszel and Ul Qoma, and their complex political and linguistic systems. Against this impressively realised backdrop is set a noirish thriller in which Inspector Borlú of the...
Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China by Leslie T Chang | Book review
"There are millions of young women, and each one has a story worth telling," explains Leslie T Chang in her years-long investigation of the enormous, shifting, predominantly female migrant population of the southern Chinese manufacturing city of Dongguan. Despite insalubrious living conditions, jobs in the massive factories making shoes...
