Simon Demetriou

When the youthful narrator of Claire Keegan’s newly re-released novella describes the moment that Dave Kinsella, her temporary foster father, ‘puts his arms around me and gathers me into ...

Regular readers of this column (if such people exist), will have discerned that I am a fan of Nghi Vo. Her third novella in the The Singing Hills Cycle, Into ...

Since I began reviewing for The Cyprus Mail, a clear and joyous pattern has emerged: get your hands on the debut novel of a great poet, and you’re in ...

The title of the James Hannaham’s latest novel is ironic, because one would need to be both inhuman and immune to stylistic brilliance to be able to spend any ...

One’s response to Claire Keegan’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel Small Things Like These perhaps hinges on how a reader responds to the protagonist, Bill Furlong, wondering ‘was there ...

I may not be forgiven for this, but I didn’t really enjoy Treacle Walker. The weight of evidence is against me: earlier this year, the novel had just made ...

At the end of Less is Lost, the narrator, aspiring novelist Freddy Pelu, arrives at the realisation that ‘… to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about ...

Open Water is a book heavily punctuated by question marks. Over and over again, the unnamed narrator asks ‘… what is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?’; ‘...

Everybody knows that the abolition of slavery didn’t stop humans being treated as commodities. In Babel, RF Kuang uses a fantastical version of mid-nineteenth-century Britain to explore the ways ...

Rabbit, the elderly woman who recounts the tale of the empress In-yo from her exile to triumphant vengeance, sums up what she has learned with the aphorisms: ‘Honor is a ...

I have never looked up at an image of the Virgin Mary and wondered, ‘Hey, did you have any hobbies…?’ or hoped that she ‘managed to…take naps when [she] ...

When Little Dog, the narrator and protagonist of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, recalls being victimised on the school bus, he notes that the bully ‘was only nine but ...

Omar, the 12-year-old narrator and protagonist of Elizabeth Laird’s novel, realises upon fleeing Syria that ‘Nobody saw us as real people… We were just refugees.’ Welcome to Nowhere performs ...

It takes guts to write a very short book. The insecure writer justifies everything, gives everything a motive, a backstory, layer upon layer of detail; they bludgeon you into suspending ...

At the end of the penultimate chapter of Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel the narrator suddenly breaks the omniscient, third-person voice that has told the story so far. Addressing the ...

Any fondness I have for Snow Country is because the novel was given to me as a gift. Unfortunately, given that this book sets out to be a dramatic love ...

If Harvey Weinstein and his ilk were actual monsters rather than figurative ones, it might make the abuse, sexism, homophobia, exploitation and dehumanisation that seems to have marked the history ...

About 12 years after the events of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Simon, the neighbour tasked with writing down Katharina Kepler’s account of the events leading up to ...

It’s strange to be able to say that a novel would be better if it were longer, but also that it would be better if it were shorter. The ...

When Selin, the protagonist of Either/Or, realises that she is no good at what her Harvard course list calls ‘Creative Writing’, she finds a way to avoid letting this ...

We all know that HR people tend to be treated with suspicion in the workplace. (Apologies to any HR people reading this. You may, of course, be the exception, so ...

Since John Waters’ work is routinely called transgressive and perverse, perhaps it should not be surprising that the book Liarmouth most reminds me of is Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate ...

The best that can be said about Hidden Treasures, the latest offering from Limassol-based author Michelle Adams, is that it has the makings of a successful Hallmark Channel movie. By ...

When something doesn’t quite fit into the genre you expected, it’s tempting to write something like, ‘This is more than just a crime novel’. The problem with that, ...