It begins, often, with a fragment: a single sheet of paper, a smudged date in the corner, a sentence that looks ordinary until you realise it reframes everything you thought the novel meant. I remember the first time I felt that jolt. I was alone in a small archive in a provincial museum, standing...
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Reading Guides
I love setting myself a small, intense reading mission: seven days, one region,...
Reading Guides
I often find that the first barrier to reading translated poetry is not the...
New Voices
I often find the most thrilling reading discoveries not on bestseller lists but...
Reading Guides
I build reading lists the way I pack a small bag for a trip: with attention to...
I confess: serialized Victorian novels used to intimidate me. The idea of starting a book that sprawled across months (or years) of instalments felt like opening a ledger rather than sinking into a story. Then I started treating these works as...
I still remember the first time I realised my relationship with crime fiction could be more than Nordic thrillers and blockbuster TV adaptations. A reader at the shop asked me for “something like Stieg Larsson but not Swedish,” and I felt that...
I keep a small stack of nineteenth‑century poetry on my desk at all times — not the canonical handful everyone learns in school, but a scattered assemblage of voices that used to sit at the edges of anthologies. Over the last few years I’ve...
I open nearly every translated book these days with two small but powerful rituals: I skim the translation notes (if there are any) and I check who the translator is. Over years of reading across languages, I’ve learned that these tiny sections...
I like reading routes—small, deliberate itineraries you can follow that bring you to unexpected places. A month-long reading route through postcolonial short fiction is one of my favourite ways to travel without leaving home: it’s compact,...
When I first returned to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children after years away from it, I expected the bruising domestic drama I remembered. What surprised me was how the book's power sits not in plot alone but in the porous, restless...
There is a special kind of pleasure in getting inside a dense modernist novel: the sensation of being tested, of having to slow down and think differently. But that pleasure is fragile. Read too quickly or with the wrong expectations, and you may...
I still remember the first time I held a book from a press I’d never heard of before. It wasn’t a polished hardback with a glossy jacket and celebrity blurbs — it was a slim paperback from Galvanised Books, the kind of title that looks like it...
I’ve sat across from authors in bookshop backrooms, over coffee, on panels and through pixelated video calls. Across formats and temperaments one thing becomes quickly clear: the questions we ask shape what we get. Ask for a sales pitch and...
I have a soft spot for charity shops and secondhand stalls—their mismatched shelves and cardboard boxes feel like invitations. Over the years I’ve learned to read those murmured voices of books: the cracked spines that have been loved, the...