Sophia Barnes

Coming Unstuck

The best of the stories in Hold Your Fire are those which combine the keenness of Wilson’s perception with a sense of narrative containment.

Reading the Cues

The Animals in that Country was published in March 2020. It might be tempting to see the timing of publication as serendipitous, or portentous, depending on your perspective. A novel about a ‘zoanthropathic’ super-flu precipitating wholesale socia...

The Ghost Creature: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

Wood’s writing continues to grow in assurance which each new work: never fussy, but grounded, and intensely physical.

Found by Trouble

The authors share a lyrical sensibility and a finely-tuned sense of how the fantastical and the mundane, the hopeful and the brutal, are woven together in the stories which define our communities.

Desert Time

Anthony Uhlmann has long been interested in the philosophical function of literature – not only its capacity to contain philosophical discussion, but the formal unfolding of the literary work itself as a philosophical act. St Antony in His Desert,...

Excavating the Past: Ceridwen Dovey’s Garden of the Fugitives

In the Breech: Sofie Laguna's The Choke

Sofie Laguna was a successful writer of children’s and YA fiction before publishing her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, in 2008. Readers of that startling debut, or of her 2015 Miles Franklin Award winner The Eye of the Sheep, will find ma...

Two Lives: Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing

If, for much of our lives, we regard our parents as indispensable to ourselves, defined and understood by their relationship to us – whether loving or fractious, distant or close – then this last work is Lessing’s gift to hers: a belated acknowled...

The Bleeding Edge: new short fiction

The short story is sometimes viewed as an apprentice form, yet the heterogeneity of the stories collected in these volumes attests to its adaptability in structure, style, voice and genre – and to the particular freedoms it offers as a site for ex...

Something Beyond The Natural: Hold by Kirsten Tranter

The world in which we find ourselves begins to blur around the edges, its parameters shifting and changing. Precisely how we are to understand the room and its relationship to Shelley’s consciousness is never clear, and becomes less clear with eac...

What To Leave Out

Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw ma...

Restless Fictions

‘The mantle of emerging author can be a heavy one, particularly for those whose work has already garnered critical acclaim at manuscript stage. While these three share the advantage such attention brings them in what is a busy marketplace for new

Formed and tested

At the centre of each of these narratives – nine short stories and three novels – is a woman or a girl. Some are empathetic, others cruelly selfish; some are extroverts and others aloof; some are acerbically witty and others dangerously naive. Des...

Beat Poet Kool-Aid: An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman

The decision to write in a semi-autobiographical style raises inevitable questions. Is this fiction or autobiography? To what degree can we speak of the narrator ‘Luke Carman’ as a ‘character’ in the author Luke Carman’s collection of vignettes?

And, and, and

‘So why write novels?’ Doris Lessing asks in the preface she affixed to her most famous work, The Golden Notebook, almost ten years after its first publication in 1962. Her semi-rhetorical question stemmed from a conviction that within another ten...