The Mark and the Void – Paul Murray’s take on the Celtic Tiger

Literary CriticismBy Charlotte20th August 2015

Written for The Guardian:   This is it, at last: a fine work of fiction set in the present day that kicks all those asses that so urgently need to be kicked. Twenty pages in and I wanted to tour the nation’s nine remaining bookshops with Murray and shout from the back: “That’s what I’m…

The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood review – an absorbing insight into human creativity…

Literary CriticismBy Dave18th July 2015Leave a comment

For The Guardian: Note to all readers: keep going. I spent 137 pages of The Ecliptic thinking it was a very good but misconceived novel in which a talented male author had taken an artistically self-sabotaging decision to make his first-person protagonist – Elspeth Conroy, a Glaswegian painter – a woman with an oddly oblique antiquarian voice…