White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer I like Dyer, like his fiction, like his travel writing, especially like his masterful book on the Great War. But I’m less impressed, in fact profoundly unimpressed, when he starts writing about jazz. Even when he’s not writing about jazz...

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer This is an odd book, an odd reading experience, a book about a book but a book about a book that doesn’t really - and never will - exist. It’s slow to start, too. After rather too many pages describing the author’s procrastination this b...

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry You can’t read Sebastian Barry slowly. It’s like poetry. It IS poetry! How else to explain a sentence like this? ‘Such are the embers of things spoken when the great conflagration of life is nearly over...’ WHAT a sentence! And the book ...

Burning Bright by Helen Dunmore Dark, yes, and with moments of heart-thumping tension so great it makes you skip through prose you know demands attention just because you want to find out what is happening. And then there’s the ending. Without giving anything away, I t...

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry ‘Unsurpassed in First World War fiction’ it says on the cover, and that’s quite a lofty canon. But this addition does indeed rank there with them, even among the highest. One of the most moving, thought-provoking and heart-rending books ...

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