Simon Demetriou

Running for a seat in the US Senate sounds tricky at the best of times. If you then imagine that your daughter’s got herself involved with a devastatingly handsome ...

I liked When We Were Birds so much that I find it very difficult to review. Once I had finished reading the book, it was like being on the receiving ...

Towards the end of Grounds-keeping, Alma, the Ivy League educated writer in residence of Ashby College in Kentucky, criticises the writing of Owen, the novel’s protagonist and narrator. Her ...

Not a lot of people think of the classical Latin roots of the word ‘matrix’ when they hear it. But to understand Lauren Groff’s latest novel, a fictionalised history ...

There is a chance that you might find Strange Hotel boring. After all, very little happens: we see the nameless protagonist in hotel room after hotel room, city after city, ...

Over 3,000 songs, 25 number one singles and 44 Top 10 country albums testify to the obvious fact that Dolly Parton knows more than almost anyone about what it takes to write a hit. ...

Ranting has something of a bad name. People who rant might be a little unhinged. Or taking themselves – and their topic – too seriously. But a good rant is magnificent. You ...

Like all good crime fiction, Colson Whitehead’s eighth novel is concerned with things that are hidden in more or less plain sight. But where the crime fiction that defined ...

There’s only one method to gauge the standard of a piece of comic fiction: how much does it irritate the friends, loved ones, or strangers who have to share ...

The Baudelaire Fractal is a novel that feels at the same time extremely modern and extremely traditional. And this makes sense, given narrator Hazel Brown spends a good deal of ...

Pure Colour is generally regarded to be strange. And it is. After all, a book that creates its own cosmology, where our world is just the first draft of creation ...

Writers love setting novels on academic campuses, which is fair enough since shoving together lots of neurotic people desperately searching for one kind of approval or another makes for an ...

Picking a pseudonym must be a struggle. However, one must question Nita Pronovost’s choice of Prose as her pen-surname. Because if you’re going to name yourself after your ...

It’s hard to find something to new to say about a book – or rather, a short story – that is already well known. Recitatif was first published in 1983, and has ...

I like books that don’t use speech marks. It makes sense that there should be no formal distinction between dialogue and narrative, they are both part of the same ...