Simon Demetriou

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 ...

Stereotypically, we’re not short on warmth in Cyprus. We have over 300 sunny days per year, and there are lots of contexts in which we do our best to live ...

During the christening of her granddaughter, Ruth, the protagonist of Loved and Missed, tries to calm the rage welling up inside her at the fact that her daughter, Eleanor, had ...

Given the proliferation of books about or set during the pandemic, it seems I’m in the minority when it comes to finding the idea of a novel about people ...

In IS Berry’s debut spy thriller, her protagonist, 52 and at the tail-end of his career in espionage, finds himself reflecting more and more on his ability to ‘do the ...

Once again, I find myself doing things the wrong way round. Often, I’ve reviewed the latest book by an author with whose back catalogue I have been painfully unfamiliar. ...

In The Merchant of Venice, Portia says that ‘I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching’. ...

When a co-worker turns the handle on the door that usually leads to a closet, opening it to reveal a terrace that definitely wasn’t there before, Annie and Edward, ...

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Jhumpa Lahiri’s work that her latest collection of short stories deals with people who are out of place, detached ...

There’s nothing wrong with a murder mystery, so when I say that The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is both more and less than a murder mystery, I’m ...