Poetry

Those who have read Madeleine Thien’s bestselling Do Not Say We Have Nothing will recognise The Book of Records as being the title of the manuscript at its heart – a dangerously dissenting history of China. In her latest novel, Thien uses the title to explore the future rather than the past – or so it seems at first. Extensive flooding has caused Lina and her father to leave Foshan and retreat to ‘the Sea’, a labyrinthine ‘nothing place’ where people usually shelter just for a short while before moving on. It resembles Kowloon Walled City, the immense, densely populated structure that, before being demolished, was close to where Thien’s

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century. He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is,

This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein: I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician]. Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.  Towards the end of his life, in

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand. Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of

Many readers of Dante get no further than the Inferno. The inscription over the gates of Hell, the demon-haunted circles, the howling winds that buffet the lovers Paolo and Francesca, even the poet’s grim profile and bonnet, are part of the world’s literary and artistic heritage. Several translators also stop at the point that the dazed poet and his guide Virgil emerge from the bowels of the Earth into the astonishing starlight. It’s no surprise that Inferno seizes the imagination, but it’s only a third of the story; and possibly for Dante himself just the part you have to plunge through before you get to the good bits. Philip Terry’s

Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner

Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’. But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how