Simon Demetriou

Late on in SA Cosby’s Southern gothic thriller, sheriff Titus Crown reflects that, ‘violence begets more violence and all violence is a confession of pain’. There’s plenty of ...

In Guided Tour, perhaps the most viscerally striking of Millhauser’s latest collection of short stories, the tour guide from AuthentiTour warns his 17 tourists to ‘beware of stories. Stories have ...

The experience and byproducts of disillusionment have long been fruitful subjects for literature, and in Alexander Lowell’s new book, he presents a figure caught in two states that are ...

Following up a debut as striking as 2021’s Open Water was always going to be a tough ask. Caleb Azumah Nelson’s second novel Small Worlds returns to the themes ...

‘What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?’ This rhetorical question bookends Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, the follow up ...

Crime fiction gets a bad rap because it’s a genre where you can get away with a lot of literary sins provided your plotting is fast and twisty, and ...

When a short book takes you longer than it should to read, there are a few viable explanations. First, the writing was so dense that you needed to take time ...

Someone who wrote for Schitt’s Creek should know a thing or two about turning a devastating life event into comedy. In Really Good, Actually, Monica Heisey turns her attentions ...

It’s not a new thought to any pet owner to wonder what the animals surrounding us would have to say about us if only they could speak. Well, in ...

At one point in Lorrie Moore’s fourth novel, her central character, Finn, feels ‘that every couple was absurd and brought out the absurdity in each other’. You might, reflecting ...

The Mimicking of Known Successes is concerned with the work of human scholars on Jupiter attempting to reconstruct life on Earth in an idealistic attempt to return to the planet ...

‘People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence’, thinks Tom Kettle, the retired policeman whose interior monologue ...

I don’t know what it says about the depth of my Raymond Chandler fandom that I find even a poor imitation to be worth reading. Maybe I should deride ...

If someone ever says to you, ‘I swear, it was never as psychopathic as it sounds’, you can be immediately certain of two things: one, it absolutely was that psychopathic; ...

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the modern penal system aims to make its objects into ‘docile bodies’ through the shift away from punishment as a public spectacle and ...

Words make promises that we’re too often left scrambling to fulfil. In Jessica George’s debut novel, the word that’s dragged her protagonist, Madeleine Wright, behind it for ...

In the course of Shy, Max Porter’s fourth novel, the eponymous first-person narrator identifies the following languages: ‘night-end’, ‘badger’ and ‘heartsore’. It’s telling of a book about how ...

A good writer can write a bad book, but that doesn’t mean we have to forgive them for it. In Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh shows off her capacity to ...

‘Guilty pleasure’ really is a stupid phrase – unless of course what you take pleasure in is something truly awful like kicking kittens or tax fraud. Surely, we should all just ...

From The Real Housewives of Orange County to Yellowstone, the lives of the immensely rich seem to have a hold over the popular imagination that allows almost any cultural production ...

In her acknowledgements, Claire Jimenez writes that ‘colonialism, racism, and femicide have been forces that shaped my reality and the way I am seen or not seen in this world’. ...

If you’ve read Jane Eyre, did you ever wonder why as readers we cheer Jane on when she refuses Rochester’s proposal to live in a faux marriage, but ...

Have you heard the one about the dead girl? In I Have Some Questions for You, the words ‘It was the one’ ring out, over and over again: ‘It was ...

Having become infatuated with Jen Beagin via her most recent novel, Big Swiss, I am now rationing her two previous books so as not to run out too quickly. Pretend ...