Book review: Death can be shocking, entertaining and tedious
There’s something compelling about hitmen, whether the first one you think of is Leon, Martin Blank, Jason Bourne, or any of the other bad, flawed but ultimately rivetingly cool ...
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Book review: Short in length but long in achievement
One of the best lines in one of the best books I read last year is, ‘If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.’ That’...
Book Review: Gripping tale of ordinary folk
If I told you that a book started with weather-based small-talk and crisps at the pub and ended with speculations on the lifespan of a rickety boiler, you might feel ...
Book Review: This really is a rollicking good read
By Simon Demetriou
I’m pretty sure I’ve never described a book as rollicking before. Rollicking isn’t typically one of my words. But Go Gentle is rollicking. And ...
Book Review: How reality and fiction bleed into each other
In Transcription, Ben Lerner’s narrator refers early on to a seminal moment in his life when he was taken to see Harvard’s glass flowers and began to develop ...
Book Review: Tense and tender moments are a long time coming
Emily Nemens’ sophomore novel about millennial female friendship has garnered the sort of positive press that might be expected when the former editor of The Paris Review follows up her ...
Book review: Mad premise for a hilarious book
I spent much of the end of 2025 and start of 2026 moaning about people who ought to know about funny books claiming that unfunny books were actually funny. Evidently, this means ...
Book review: Sprawling mosaic of speculative history
When a reviewer’s oldest friend publishes their first novel, it puts said reviewer in a potentially sticky spot from which there is only one satisfactory release: you need to ...
What’s good for entertainment is bad for learning
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, and I almost never review non-fiction. The Digital Delusion is a book I felt I had to make an exception for, because ...
Tainting a good story with undercooked critical theory
Your response to this novel’s title, and specifically the word ‘postcolonial’, is likely to determine your subsequent enjoyment of the book. Because a novel that points knowingly at both ...
Book review: Is a law degree no guarantee of happiness?
I’ve now read all of the novels shortlisted for the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction aside from the two written by actual comedians (sorry, Sandi Toksvig and ...
Book review: Who doesn’t like jokes about ISIS brides and dysfunctional UN workers?
Onto another of the shortlisted novels for the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. This time, a debut from academic and peace-building practitioner (that’s what her bio says) ...
Book review: Joyous, uplifting, but not funny
I’ll be the first to admit that there have been occasions where a joke will go over my head. And even more times when I’ve read or heard ...
Book review: Comic bardolatry seems to be on the up
It strikes me that colder, darker days require more laughter than the brightness and warmth of most of the Cypriot year. Fortunately, as a side-effect of my decision that the ...
The best books of 2025
2025 felt a bit uneven as far as literary fiction went, with a number of big-name writers and novels failing to live up to their billing. But as the year drew ...
Book review: The dying art of humans putting the world to rights
I look forward to my annual Jack Reacher novel, especially as they always come out around the time of year that back in the cultural golden age of the nineties ...
Book review: Shakespearean comedy for the modern child
There’s a brilliant moment in the BBC comedy Upstart Crow when Shakespeare – played by David Mitchell – defends his work as a comic writer by saying, ‘If you do your ...
Book review: Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett’s last novel, Checkout 19, was one of the best things I read in 2022. In 2025, Bennett is back with another novel that plays with the slipperiness, vitality and insufficiency ...
Book review: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
In yet another mark of my lack of sophistication, I have to confess to only ever having read two Pynchon novels. And what’s worse, they’re his two shortest. ...
Book review: Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite
When I found Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut, My Sister, The Serial Killer, on my father-in-law’s shelf, I knew a couple of pages in that I was reading something special, ...
Book review: Stories can be the antidote to so much
People don’t read Charles Lamb enough anymore, which is a terrible shame because he is utterly brilliant in so many ways. Perhaps above all, though, we should read him ...
Scatology and sagacity: a winning combination
Leave it to me to encounter a writer that virtually every child and the majority of parents and teachers have already been reading for decades when he decides to publish ...
Cynicism, sociopathy, and sadness: in other words, war
Phoebe Greenwood is by no means the first novelist to write a war satire, nor the first to specifically lampoon the way in which journalists and those who publish and ...
Food and sex: a classic combo coming to a screen near you
I am not on social media, so Tart is my first exposure to Slutty Cheff, the pseudonymous Instagram minor-celebrity whose posts about being a woman on the London restaurant scene ...