Simon Demetriou

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 ...

‘…when spooky fucking haunted dolls start writing messages on the wall, you should get the fuck out.’ This seems like a fairly self-evident truth, but Louise, the protagonist of Grady ...

I’m in love. Among the many crude ways in which I judge books, one of the most common and basic is whether or not a book makes me want ...

Now, I can’t pretend to have read any of the Icelandic sagas or eddas, which are the literary works in whose tradition All the Horses of Iceland purports to ...

Using rock-climbing as a metaphor for life’s challenges, defeats and successes sounds like a trite idea. One would assume, therefore, that a novel that placed this metaphor at its ...

A debut novel is always exciting. When it’s a debut novel that brings together corporate law, third wave coffee, and doomsday survivalism written by someone with a history of ...

Writing a murder mystery in which it turns out that the people you most suspect are the people who deserve the most suspicion might be seen as edgy and counter-conventional. ...

Opening reviews with admissions of ignorance is becoming something of a habit, but, once again, I have to admit that Tom Perrotta’s 2022 sequel to 1998’s Election was my first ...

Very Cold People is an odd book for me to review, because while it has plenty of literary merit, it is a book that I just didn’t enjoy reading. ...

A coming-of-age novel that repeatedly references The Catcher in the Rye is setting itself a hard task. However, while Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion cannot live up to ...