Flesh by David Szalay
A review of the 2025 Booker Prize winner.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
A review of the messy but rich novel, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Flashlight by Susan Choi
A review of the gut-wrenching Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist novel, Flashlight.
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon: a review
Thomas Pynchon is fed up. Shadow Ticket, his ninth novel, published more than a decade after Bleeding Edge, is less so a world in which nefarious organisations collide in an ongoing conflict, but more so a world lost. Whilst regarded as a lesser Pynchon, perhaps even in the middle of
When the buzzing stops
The case for saving insects, and ourselves
Lessons in Chemistry
Alice emphasises the power of representative role models in literature
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
Can love survive the modern world?
2025 Nobel Prize in Literature: László Krasznahorkai
A snapshot of Hungarian author who took home the Nobel Prize in Literature this year
The New Age of Sexism
In The New Age of Sexism, feminist author Laura Bates dives into the darkest corners of the virtual world: from browsing sex robots for sale online, to visiting a German cyber brothel, to witnessing sexual assault in the metaverse. The result is a harrowing yet necessary account of how women
Persuading you to give Persuasion a go
Somewhere in Waterstones, Daunt Books, or the local South Kensington Books just down Exhibition Road, is an Austen gem tucked sheepishly away with not many attribute attention to; the stunningly mature and endlessly inspiring story of Anne Elliot: Persuasion
The internet has broken reading
Over the summer I started reading Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. The book assesses how algorithms have skewed and skewered out culture. More on that in a future issue. Filterworld helped me create awareness about my existence as someone who has grown up with the internet as
The Beautiful and Damned
There is something to be said about the way F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sophomore novel The Beautiful and Damned appears to mirror its own contents. Its prose is nothing short of beautiful, full of sparkling phrases and sentences that don’t have a word out of step. It’s eloquent