Has BookTok Saved Reading?
Having read my fair share of “BookTok” books, I will never trust book recommendations from TikTok again. TikTok was launched in 2016, but “BookTok” as a subsection only started to…
Loveless – Alice Oseman
Words by Emily Hyatt When people think of Alice Oseman their first thought goes to the popular British Netflix series, Heartstopper. However, Oseman created another book that grapples with the…
Mr. Loverman – Bernadine Evaristo
Words and photograph by Orla Donoghue 74-year old Barringdon (Barry) Walker is married to Carmel Walker, father of two girls, emigrated to London from Antigua as part of the Windrush…
Review of ‘Jews Don’t Count’ by David Baddiel
Words by book editor, Angelika Skora This book has been around for a few years now, and when it first hit the shelves, it wasn’t easy to miss. The black…
Learning to Love Reading Again
Despite having a degree in English Literature, I spent much of my undergraduate time holding a love-hate relationship with the very concept of reading.
Survivor By Octavia E. Butler
Survivor was the third novel that was successfully sold and published by African American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.
Racial Discrimination, Solitude and Identitiy – Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020)
Words by Paige Braithwaite “Real Life” is the debut novel by author Brandon Taylor that follows a young Black man named Wallace over the course of a hot and heady…
Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters (2021)
Words by Saskia May An international bestseller, Torrey Peters’s debut novel Detransition, Baby, is rich in plot, characters and themes, from sexuality and gender to relationships and family. Set in…
Top Five Books on Identity
Words by Saskia May Ancient and magical is the tradition and art of storytelling. Literature can offer us explanations for human behaviour, it can draw out our hidden feelings, and…
Maternal Ambivalence and Imposter Syndrome: My experience of undergraduate, archival research
Words by Saskia May Sunshine was flickering through the green beech trees as the bus dropped me at The Keep, University of Sussex. The carpark of the archival centre was…
Romanticising the Real: Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love (2018)
Words by Megan Whitehead, Staff Writer If I was ever forced onto a desert island and only had one item to bring with me, I would pick Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything…
Review: I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Words by Lucy Atwood If you like reading in bed, late at night then I’m Thinking of Ending Things might not be the book for you. It’s a unique, unsettling,…
Book Review: Assembly by Natasha Brown (2021)
Words by Saskia May, Books Editor Reflecting on the colonialist, classist structure of British society, Assembly is a remarkably powerful book that takes a poetic and poignant look at Black…
Book review: 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World – Elif Shafak
Words by Paige Braithwaite, Staff Writer TW: Sexual assault and abuse ‘10 minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World’(2019), by British-Turkish author Elif Shafak is an absorbing and poignant…
Privilege, racism, and social satire in Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age (2019)
Words by Saskia May, Books Editor Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age (2019) is an observant, entertaining, and current examination of privilege and racism in the US. Reid…
Maternal Ambivalence in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child
Raising fascinating and current questions around motherhood and female identity, Lessing’s The Fifth Child, with its spectre of the ambivalent mother, is an immersive look into the uncanny Words by…
Book Review: The Vanishing Half
Words by Saskia May, Books Editor TW: Racism and violence The New York Times #1 bestseller, The Vanishing Half (2020), is a story with a nonlinear narrative that traverses decades,…
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Review
Words by Saskia May, Books Editor Published as a ‘biomythography’, Zami (1982) is Audre Lorde’s only novel. Loosely based on her childhood in New York in the 1930s and 40s,…
Review: The Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Words by Saskia May ‘I am glad that our love has weathered so well’, renowned modernist writer Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in October 1940. Woolf was, of course,…
Metafiction-Realism and Marxist Writing in Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?
By Molly Openshaw On the 7th September, Sally Rooney released her third and arguably most anticipated novel yet. After the release of Normal People, which was subsequently adapted into a…