  | This is Not About Me – Janice Galloway Galloway revisits her childhood (up to the age of 12) and with customary precise prose creates scenes rich with the sounds, sights and taste of Saltcoats in the 60’s. Music, sweeties, telly, knitted clothes, chips, plants, and people, all conjured with descriptions as magnificently telling as “Sophie’s wrists were lavender, her eyes rimless, congealed as eggs.” Her sister Cora crackles violently from the page, and her mother’s stiff care and sadness is equally vivid. For the most part Janice observes, attempts to decode actions and anticipate the slight twists and turns of mood that can be the difference between a sort of peace or another cruel episode. It is the beginning of Galloway’s journey to becoming one of the finest contemporary writers in the world. This is unsurpassable writing. - SC |
  | Elegy for Easterly – Petina Gappah This remarkable collection is a keenly balanced mix of gravitas and verve spiked with humour. Characters are real, engaging, flawed and feisty, and behind their personal tensions looms the chaotic backdrop of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Homes are bulldozed. Their temporary replacements bulldozed again. Inflation escalates, creating a surreal scenario in which even the poorest are dollar millionaires and a few litres of petrol cost half a billion. The black market flourishes; ‘Zimbabwe makes us all criminals’, one character says. But life carries on boisterously, with its ironies, its sadnesses, its many prejudices, and its small battles won and lost. Gappah never pulls her punches. No corrupt official, no lazy white madam, no two, three or four-timing male escapes her and her not-so-gentle wit. There is wisdom, intelligence and a sharp political awareness behind these words. A great read. -VG |
| Tell-Tales 4: The Global Village Perhaps the world is really becoming a global village. But the flip side of a mega-community is being alienated from a whole planet full of people at once. That fearful, hemmed in loneliness and the urge to resist it hold together this latest Tell Tales anthology. The collection takes in work by over twenty writers; writing styles vary wildly, but each story carries that air of alienation; whether floating like incense, concealing as fog, or stinging with the electric tang of ozone. As the stories flick from straying spouses to lost children, from refugees to urban ghosts, the overwhelming sense seems to be a whole planet of people searching for points of connection. With an international breadth of voices and themes, and no story over 10 pages, this collection wears an internet-age attitude of fragmentation and reconnection. -ST |  |
| The Bird Room - Chris Killen The Bird Room is Chris Killen’s first novel, and features two Wills, one a brash artist, and one the loser narrator. Rubbish Will lucks into a relationship with Alice, and then proceeds to destroy it with jealousy and obsessive tendencies. Meanwhile a woman – Clair, now renamed Helen – adds to the two-name confusion. If I were to create a word cloud for it, it would say, ‘Will, porn, penis, cold, needy, seedy, sad.’ It all feels deliberately puzzling, and at the end I wasn’t sure whom and what was real. Killen mixes everyday misery with dark humour and clever lines: ‘She’s become as quiet and cold as something left on a windowsill.’ or ‘There is a glass girl in my bed. If I ask too many questions she will shatter.’ A cool, witty, contemporary debut. -SC |  |
Reviews this issue: Sara Crowley, Vanessa Gebbie and Sam Taradash. |