Simon Demetriou

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 ...

There was always going to be a novel about AI’s potential for replacing human authors. Not that I’d thought of it before, but when I came across Do ...

‘Whenever people interact, that is being part of society. And the things that happen as a result of those points of contact exist in the past and the future.’ When ...

‘…what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his ...

The story of a queer, working class Nigerian boy being taken out of poverty by publishing a novel of what he calls ‘queer resistance’ that he had to hand write ...

If you’ve ever traded pretentious philosobabble across a sticky table in a dingy university bar, you are likely to be familiar with the way in which people willingly trapped ...

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 ...