Simon Demetriou

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 ...

I know I’m doing this all wrong, but I confess that Stella Maris is the first Cormac McCarthy novel I’ve read. (If that immediately disqualifies me from expressing ...

The purpose of Donald Trump’s existence is a teleological quandary that has perplexed many in recent years. The best answer we yet possess is that he was thrust into ...

Look, if you choose to read Percival Everett’s latest novel, as I recommend you do, there will be times when you feel a little stupid. Or very stupid. Unless ...

The allure of the overlooked discovery is one that seduces all enthusiasts, and the recent publication of Toad, which had lain dormant since its rejection by publishers in 1971, would seem ...

There are times in our lives that we never seem to shake off, that don’t so much haunt us as continue to form part of our core selves well ...

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 ...