WELCOME TO MY BOOKSHELF

What do a novel, an unfinished autobiography, the manuscript for a ghost-written memoir, and a diary have in common? They are all parts...

I’m starting my series of posts about this year’s Booker Prize longlist with a double review as I squeezed in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name...

Without Warning & Only Sometimes author Kit de Waal’s childhood memoir. She up with an Irish mother who, as a Jehovah’s witness forbid...

BBC talk show host George Beverly and his family live a comfortable life in their London home – until the trolls and woke people on...

Our narrator first met Tracey when they were young girls nervously waiting for their first dance class to start. Their friendship did not...

“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” is the brutal opening line of Elena Ferrante’s most...

Frances and Bobbi are students at Trinity College, Dublin. They used to be lovers, now they are best friends who perform poetry together....

Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal have been best friends since their adventures during World War II, though none of their friends and family...

In an unnamed city, where two communities live in conflict with each other, where there is a right and a wrong kind of butter, just as...

Tomorrow, the winner of the 2021 Booker Prize will be announced. Over the past few weeks I read my way through the shortlist, and it was...

What does it mean to have to change your name for your classmates to be able to pronounce and remember it? How does it feel to be...

The family Gifty remembers from early childhood is a family of four, that quickly became a family of three and way too soon was cut into...

Moll Gladney is a quiet girl, not known to cause troubles to her devout and hardworking parents. But one night she disappears from her...

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical and inseparable. Only those who know them well will be able to tell them apart: Desiree, the...

The social laws of high school dynamics govern Connell and Marianne’s behaviour. He is the popular star of the school’s football team,...

The term intersectional feminism was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight how different dimensions of oppression – for example sexism...

Grand Union is Zadie Smith’s collection of short stories, comprising eleven completely new works as well as eight stories previously...

Five letters that will never reach their destination, written by five unnamed people who come from an unnamed, war-torn country form the...

Yaa Gyasi’s stunning debut novel Homegoing traces the story of a Ghanaian family as it plays out both in the Asante region and in...

Fathers and Sons is Howard Cunnell’s beautiful memoir about growing up, about love and masculinity, about fathers and sons. This short...