Hannah Adcock

Alan Bennett

(Profile)

23 Aug 2007

Alan Bennett’s latest work is a charmingly subversive novella in which the Queen develops a taste for reading. She stumbles upon the Westminster travelling library thanks to her ill-mannered corgis, and swiftly moves from a determined and dutiful…

Julian Baggini

16 Aug 2007

Julian Baggini is certainly not afraid to engage with popular culture. He recently wrote this on BBC online: ‘Matt Groening is the true heir of Plato, Aristotle and Kant’. Although this article landed Baggini a mention in Private Eye, he talks of the…

Hal Cruttenden

14 Aug 2008

For a man apparently obsessed by the little things in life, Cruttenden tackles some pretty weighty subjects: the Irish troubles, WWII, death. He also worries about his big face, blokey physique and girly voice, wanting to be political, but unable 'to be…

Ian Stone

Wry, meandering voyage around existence

7 Aug 2008

Life's an uphill struggle. It's easier going down a hill than up. A platitude of course, but after berating a harmless walker for suggesting such a thing, Ian Stone got to thinking that it's true. The good bit is that you're not alone, as everyone is…

The Arab, the Jew and the Chicken

7 Aug 2008

Billed as a fun, fast and feisty exploration of the Middle East conflict, this is a smart show with some great sketches. Pinching and pulling various views and prejudices, these guys prove that the Gaza Strip can be a barrel of laughs. And there's a…

Tommy and the Weeks

7 Aug 2008

Ed Weeks and Tom Bell are an almost insanely energetic double act, whose 'power show' features emotional monologues, bad music and high drama. Ed is a large-faced, smooth-skinned dictator, whilst Tom looks like 'a drowned Elizabethan'. Expect an amusing…

Will Lavender - Obedience

5 Jun 2008

MYSTERY THRILLER (Macmillan) Will Lavender’s debut is a taunting puzzle mystery which explores the dark side of academia. The strangely enigmatic Professor Williams of Winchester University sets his logic and reasoning class a challenge: an…

Tim Winton - Breath

24 Apr 2008

TEENAGER STORY (Picador) Tim Winton’s first novel for seven years is ostensibly a coming of age story which follows Bruce Pike (‘Pikelet’) from naïve and wild adolescence into emotionally maimed adulthood. Most of the time, however, Breath reads like…

Will Self - The Butt

27 Mar 2008

ALLEGORICAL TALE (Bloomsbury) Will Self’s latest novel is an allegorical tale of cause and consequence, which probes the addictions of the ‘liberal West’. Tom Brodzinski thoughtlessly flips his last butt onto Reggie Lincoln’s head, setting off a chain…

George Saunders - The Brain-Dead Megaphone

13 Mar 2008

ESSAY COLLECTION (Bloomsbury) In his first collection of essays, George Saunders tries out a number of styles as he patrols the American border, investigates the British national character and bemoans the degraded quality of the American media…

Andrew O’Hagan (Ed) - A Night Out with Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems

17 Jan 2008

POETRY COLLECTION (Canongate) Robert Burns has been ‘sainted, painted, tormented and toasted’, as the book blurb playfully informs us. He is also a source of boredom for schoolchildren, linguistic perplexity for non-Scots and undiluted pleasure for…

Biyi Bandele

23 Aug 2007

Biyi Bandele is a London-based playwright, poet and author. His adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s classic African novel, Things Fall Apart, has been published as a Penguin Classic and his plays have been performed at top venues, including the National…

Joanna Neary

16 Aug 2007

A consummate mistress of the quick change, over-stretched smile and rolling eyeballs, Joanna Neary cascades from one monologue to another with a very British kind of grace. Full of quirky imagination and charming clowning, she brings to life such varied…

Nina Conti

A tender display of an ancient art

9 Aug 2007

If your idea of ventriloquism involves slightly strange men jamming their hands up fluffy toys, then think again. Nina Conti is an eminently presentable young woman, with a simian sidekick more at home with muttering depressed asides (‘oh sweet…

Skinner & Bell

9 Aug 2007

Having given up on Narnia, Dave and Dave hole up in Uncle Brian’s country house. There, they inadvertently encourage a cow to ‘moo-icide’ and discover a motley assortment of people and creatures, including a man who stuffs animals and a…

Lost Oasis

16 Jul 2007

TRAVEL ADVENTURE ROBERT TWIGGER Lost Oasis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Following in the footsteps of explorers such as Theodore Almasy, the inspiration for The English Patient, author and macho adventurer Robert Twigger decides to search for…

Have a Nice Doomsday

2 Jul 2007

SOCIAL ANALYSIS In this bizarre and quite frankly worrying book, Nicholas Guyatt journeys to the United States Bible Belt to find out why 50 million Americans believe that the apocalypse will take place in their own lifetimes. Guyatt’s main goal is…

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

4 Jun 2007

SOCIAL SATIRE Michael Chabon’s long-awaited seventh novel splices together a comic noir detective story and an alternative history of America. After the collapse of Israel in 1948, European Jews settled in the Sitka District of Alaska, but that was…

The Opposite House

Helen Oyeyemi

23 Apr 2007

SOCIAL DRAMA Helen Oyeyemi’s family left Nigeria when she was four and she draws on this experience and themes of cultural dislocation for her second novel. The Opposite House follows pregnant singer, Maja, as she tries to find ‘her Cuba’, a place…

René Weis

Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (John Murray)

12 Mar 2007

LITERARY ANALYSIS Combining taut prose with tight scholarship, René Weis has written a gripping biography of the world’s most famous Bard. With the great man’s life notoriously wreathed in mystery, Weis has plunged into the works for clues. He cites…

Jenny Turner

Brainstorm (Jonathan Cape)

29 Jan 2007

COMEDY DRAMA Set in the booming London of the 1990s, Jenny Turner’s debut novel is already a period piece. Her astringent comedy of manners captures ‘media chicks’ and their men, swearing and scheming, cocooned in Canary Wharf, unaware of the cracks…