Tag: Friday Favourite

“A historical allegory that mirrors political events through the livelihood of the Al-Jawad family, it is a seminal work of modern Arabic literature and is crucial to understanding Egypt’s modern history, society and culture.”

There is something about poetry that makes it more potent than fiction in times of need. With its raw, brash and yet strangely beautiful...

The book currently on top of my ever-growing ‘To Read’ pile is David Wallace-Well’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Based on his 2017 essay of the...

If I were to tell you that this novel is great because it’s ‘mesmerising’ and ‘powerful’ and ‘you simply can’t put it down’, you...

Svetlana Alexievich’s works are not an easy read. On the face of it, they are oral histories of the Second World War, the Soviet...

When I was a kid, I would re-read the books I found exciting, and which had characters I 'got on with' – a lot...

Amid the national and global chaos, Hugo Ortega’s new book of poetry Amantes de cartón (Cardboard Lovers) is a quiet yet powerful exploration of...

In a rare interview with LA Times in 2018, Elena Ferrante, universally-celebrated, elusive (the name is a pseudonym) author of the Neapolitan novels, was...

Sometimes you reread a book because it is beautiful; sometimes you do it because a mysterious benefactor on your flight gave you a concerning...

The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a book that I unapologetically love. As an English student with a long reading list, I don’t tend...

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, the protagonist spends her teenage years at Lowood School – an institution with a cast of cruel...

In the perverse manner of a bored and immature conscript in peacetime, I spent my weekends off in 2015 and 2016 consuming as much...

In this Coronavirus season, existing dystopian novels have suddenly become “prophetic”. The world may be grinding to a standstill, but Generation COVID can’t while...