Simon Demetriou

One of my favourite books of the past five years is Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, a novel which is, among other things, a hilarious send-up of privileged millennials living ...

It’s a brave but not uncommon thing to write a novel about the world of comedy, especially when you’re a successful comedy writer yourself. Such a novel’s ...

Schools are messed up self-contained microcosms. If you ever went to one, you’ll know what I mean. Unless maybe you were one of the cool kids for whom the ...

At the climax of Triage, one character says to the other, ‘Your romance with grief won’t help the living.’ It’s a moving line that achieves the bold narrative ...

Endings are hard. And when you’ve enjoyed two books as much as this reader enjoyed Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, it was always going to be difficult coming to ...

Here’s what happens in Man Overboard!: a man falls (or jumps) over the side of a cruise ship; he treads water for 20 hours; while treading water he thinks about ...

When Lauren Hough set off across America in 2023 in her self-refitted second-hand Dodge van, she had the twin goals of circling the US and not traumatising her dog, Woody Guthrie. ...

By Simon Demetriou In Andrew Sean Greer’s last novel, the lesson learned is that ‘up close [the world] makes no sense’. That was a valuable lesson in a wonderfully ...

Let’s start with a question: ‘Can you imagine living a fulfilling life when you cannot touch anything in your home without instantly thinking about your father’s genitals?’ Before ...

If I told you that NS Toledano is the pseudonym of a secondary school student and that Catalyst is his self-published debut fantasy novella, you’d have every right to ...

There’s something compelling about hitmen, whether the first one you think of is Leon, Martin Blank, Jason Bourne, or any of the other bad, flawed but ultimately rivetingly cool ...

One of the best lines in one of the best books I read last year is, ‘If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.’ That’...

If I told you that a book started with weather-based small-talk and crisps at the pub and ended with speculations on the lifespan of a rickety boiler, you might feel ...

By Simon Demetriou I’m pretty sure I’ve never described a book as rollicking before. Rollicking isn’t typically one of my words. But Go Gentle is rollicking. And ...

In Transcription, Ben Lerner’s narrator refers early on to a seminal moment in his life when he was taken to see Harvard’s glass flowers and began to develop ...

Emily Nemens’ sophomore novel about millennial female friendship has garnered the sort of positive press that might be expected when the former editor of The Paris Review follows up her ...

I spent much of the end of 2025 and start of 2026 moaning about people who ought to know about funny books claiming that unfunny books were actually funny. Evidently, this means ...

When a reviewer’s oldest friend publishes their first novel, it puts said reviewer in a potentially sticky spot from which there is only one satisfactory release: you need to ...

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, and I almost never review non-fiction. The Digital Delusion is a book I felt I had to make an exception for, because ...

Your response to this novel’s title, and specifically the word ‘postcolonial’, is likely to determine your subsequent enjoyment of the book. Because a novel that points knowingly at both ...

I’ve now read all of the novels shortlisted for the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction aside from the two written by actual comedians (sorry, Sandi Toksvig and ...

Onto another of the shortlisted novels for the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. This time, a debut from academic and peace-building practitioner (that’s what her bio says) ...

I’ll be the first to admit that there have been occasions where a joke will go over my head. And even more times when I’ve read or heard ...

It strikes me that colder, darker days require more laughter than the brightness and warmth of most of the Cypriot year. Fortunately, as a side-effect of my decision that the ...