I still remember the first time an annotated edition made me see a book I thought I knew in an entirely different light. I had picked up a battered novel from a secondhand stall because it kept surfacing in the margins of other books — an author other reviewers mentioned in passing, a phrase that...
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Reading Guides
I love the peculiar thrill of finding a paperback in a charity shop that seems...
Interviews
When I first began comparing translations as part of my work at Storyscoutes...
Reading Guides
I once found a slim paperback wedged between gardening manuals and a stack of...
Reading Guides
I have always loved the small, delicious friction that happens when two...
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...
When I think about the twentieth-century novels that have stayed with me longest, they’re almost always the ones that arrived quietly into my life—pulled from a mis-shelved pile in a charity shop, recommended by a bookseller who could not be...