Simon Demetriou

Can a fast-paced slow-burn be a thing? If it can, then that would be helpful as it’s really the only way I can explain what reading Thomas Grattan’s ...

For eight hours a day (ish), I am a teacher, and so I find myself implicated in an ongoing struggle for direction. It is assumed, and schools and parents do ...

Some recent trends: novels about corporate corruption; novels about sham tech start-ups; cosy mystery novels. For her second novel, Emma Rosenblum has decided to jump on all three of these ...

There’s something exceptionally satisfying about a writer getting a simile right. When you read, you know that every piece of phrasing is a precise judgement, but there’s something ...

If a historical murder mystery set in Sicily and featuring badass women across multiple generations doing it for themselves in spite of convention and circumstance sounds good to you, then ...

If you’ve ever sat down with the Hallmark Channel on in the background (whether because this is the case, or because you’d rather not confess to ever having ...

Towards the end of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Filomena, the great-souled and semi-tragic cemetery-keeper, says that ‘All stories are good stories if you find the right listener’. That an ...

If you’re a corporation that wants to convince your customers that you’re a company on the up, and that the absence of workers on the shop floor is ...

‘…if you don’t have… the right skin colour and you don’t have the right geographic background, you’re fucked.’ Reading this, most would assume that ‘right’ would equate ...

I’m tempted to start this review with a reference to Charles Lamb’s exhortation to retain our childishness always, so that we never lose the capacity to respond to ...

When I reviewed Aug Stone’s novel The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, I found myself returning to, not to say butting against, the coolness of the book that didn’...

“If you don’t know about object-oriented ontology, I’m not sure you can have a conversation about contemporary art,” says one gallerist early on in Bianca Bosker’s account ...

I’ve remarked before that getting hold of a poet’s debut novel is a pretty safe bet that you’ll have something good to read, and DéLana R....

In a recent review, I wrote about how unease and pretty sentences aren’t enough to make a good novel. This week, I find myself reviewing another novel that is ...

The title of Isabel Waidner’s fourth novel refers to the name of the talk show that her eponymous narrator is offered after they play their part in the sudden ...

When, at the very end of the book, Alex Michaelides’ narrator Elliot Chase addresses the reader with the line, ‘I’m certainly no good at writing stories’, I suspect he ...

Never letting your reader know quite what’s going in is a fairly standard formula for the generation of unease. Sarah Bernstein’s second novel is high on unease. It’...

In keeping with my apparently unavoidable tendency to do things the wrong way round, my first Jack Reacher novel also happens to be the latest of the 28 that Lee Child (...

There are events in everyone’s lives that leave them feeling irrevocably altered afterwards. In passing through these times, we inevitably leave something behind at the same time as we ...

I’m a bit annoyed that I didn’t really like The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass. First, it’s called The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass and that’s ...

I would struggle to resist a satirical campus novel at the best of times, but when a satirical campus novel comes along in which the central edifice is obviously meant ...

I don’t know whether choosing to read the sequel of a book that I found offensively awful is behaviour that would be categorised as morbid curiosity or sadomasochism, but ...

The title of this piece is obviously a lie. I don’t know what the best books of 2023 are. But I do have some books that, when I look back ...

Having recently read a spy novel also published by Simon & Schuster, which fell disappointingly short of the bar set by genre-definers like Le Carré and Greene, I was tentative ...