I want to convince you of a small, delicious experiment: choose one single overlooked novel and let it reshape the way you read for months. Not a shortlist, not a genre binge, but one book chosen with curiosity and a willingness to be led. I’ve done this many times—pulled a misfiled novel from...
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Interviews
When I started doing author interviews and scouring the small-press landscape...
Deep Reads
I first fell in love with restored annotations the way many of us fall in love...
Reading Guides
I still remember the small thrill of picking up a paperback with a cover I...
Reading Guides
I found the paperback by accident — wedged spine-out between a gardening...
I love the little thrill that comes when a book you thought you knew finds a surprising echo in something new. Pairing a neglected classic with a contemporary counterpart is one of my favourite reading games: it sharpens attention, reveals...
I remember the first time a debut novel by a writer from an underrepresented background stopped me mid-page and made me reorder my reading list. It wasn’t just the novelty of a voice I hadn’t heard before; it was the way the book treated time,...
I still remember the thrill of opening a novelist’s backlist for the first time—the sense that a whole world of books had been waiting, quietly, behind the one everyone had been talking about. Backlists are where you find the brittle early...
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...