Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social history and condition report…
-
-
In Lily King’s portrait of the artist as a young woman, Casey is a 31-year-old aspiring author living in late-1990s Massachusetts. She waits tables at an upscale restaurant to pay the…
-
After muddling through the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at school, it was with a measure of trepidation that I embarked on Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims, which also follows a…
-
In Andrés Neuman’s latest novel, we meet Yoshie Watanabe, a retired electronics executive, in a Tokyo subway station one afternoon when he feels a vibration, then a tremor, before “the floor…
-
As the theologian Paul Tillich defined the distinction, loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is the glory of being alone. Both solitude and socialising can be enjoyable when we…
-
Tori Amos launched her career at the age of 13, performing at Mr Henry’s, a Washington DC gay bar for tips collected in a brandy snifter atop the piano. Her father,…