Gun-toting rebels seize government buildings, take hostages and appear on state television to announce the overthrow of a “corrupt” regime. The army intervenes, and the insurgents become the heroes of the moment – or its cannon fodder. The BBC arrives. Welcome to the generic coup d’etat. Read more
In literature, nothing dates like tomorrow. The hypothetical readers of the late 21st century may look back on the Armageddon fixation of some of today’s dystopic fiction with an indulgent smile. But they may also be struck by how much of the political and physical landscape they recognise. That the radically altered world on the […]
“I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” confesses Rosemary’s mother in Karen Joy Fowler’s wise, provocative and wildly endearing take on family love. Did no one warn Mrs Cooke to be careful what she wished for? Had she any inkling of the family cataclysm her innocent desire would engender, and the complex repercussions her daughter […]
Thanks to television drama, every British TV licence-payer now has a passive acquaintance with Danish, and Copenhagen is at its most globally recognised since Hans Christian Andersen’s day. It seems we can’t get enough of the place. Read more
If a Japanese-American writer who is also a Zen Buddhist priest wrote a post-Japanese tsunami novel, what themes might you imagine she would address? Biculturalism, water, death, memory, the female predicament, conscience, the nature of time and tide? Tick. All there. Throw in the second world war, the reader-writer relationship, depression, ecological collapse, suicide, origami, a […]
Climate change: the spectre hanging over every child, is the single most urgent issue of our times – and a challenge to any novelist. But how to write fiction about the Earth’s storm-filled future without a whiff of the pulpit? Barbara Kingsolver’s paradoxical solution is to set her story on a sheep farm in the […]
“Newfoundland seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real,” notes an American doctor when he first encounters the remote settlement of Paradise Deep. Read more
“Drastic change, danger, mass destruction, lives upended, radical re-thinkings of the status quo, new societal rules, moral dilemmas, the grinding physicality of daily survival … what’s not to love? Environmental cataclysms open huge imaginative possibilities for any writer– and reader – with an interest in big ideas and a penchant for the apocalyptic.” Read more […]
