Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’
Before They Began to Shrink
Nic Dunlop
‘The numbers killed at Aughrim that day will never be known.’
Best Book of 1943: Love In A Fallen City by Eileen Chang
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
‘Eileen Chang writes perfectly for the romantic in an unromantic and unrelenting world.’
Best Book of 1971: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Kevin Breathnach
‘The novel submits to an internalized discipline: it is an observation machine’
Best Book of 1982: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Eleanor Chandler
‘While the terrible pain of speech is made clear, this book ultimately reminds us that we must not be silenced.’
Best Book of 1991: Mao II by Don DeLillo
Colin Barrett
‘The ultimate goal of each act of art, each work of terror, is to demolish the old, incumbent reality, and create a new one.’
Best Book of 2000: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Will Boast
Will Boast on why Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent is the best book of 2000.
Best Book of 2008: To the End of the Land, by David Grossman
Lily Dunn
‘David Grossman is a writer who speaks to the heart, and this is his masterpiece.’
Black Country
Anthony Cartwright
‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’
Brexit Win
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
‘The poor hated the poor, natives hated outsiders, settled migrants hated new incomers, the North hated the South, non-Londoners hated London.’
Bucharest, Broken City
Philip Ó Ceallaigh
‘It is only consciousness and memory that hold together the things we sometimes see as solid.’
Coventry
Rachel Cusk
‘War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.’
