When a midlist novel slips out of print notices, fades from the pages of review roundups and ends up mis-shelved in used bookstores, it isn't always because it's bad. Often it's a casualty of marketing cycles, publishing trends and the attention economy. I've made rescuing such books a small art...
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Interviews
Interviewing a small-press editor is one of the most rewarding things I do....
Reading Guides
It happens to me quite often: I want to read a foreign-language book that...
Reading Guides
I once found a single marginal note in a seventeenth‑century pamphlet—a...
Deep Reads
When I pull a secondhand book from a shelf and find handwriting in the margins,...
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...
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...