The launch of my new small press CONDUIT BOOKS has so far been covered by the Guardian (twice), the Times, the Telegraph, the Bookseller, Radio 4 and the French literary magazine Actualitté. Read and listen here:
The Guardian 28th April 2025
The Guardian 2nd May 2025
Radio 4 PM with Evan Davis (at 23.50) 29th April 2025
Latest Substack: I wrote about seeing a double-bill of Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun at the Aylesbury Odeon as a nine-year-old... And then rereading all the Ian Fleming Bond books again forty years later, with some unexpected results. Read A Cup of Mud for free here
Xiaolu Guo's remarkable feminist reimagining of Moby-Dick is, among other things, a rollicking adventure novel. Here's my review of Call Me Ishmaelle in the Literary Review
And we have a winner! Congratulations to Gäelle Béllem & Bullaun Press for winning the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize with the outstanding tragi-comic tour-de-force There's A Monster Behind the Door. Read the Guardian coverage here
Thanks to my fellow judges Alice Jolly & Houman Barekat. Also thanks to Neil Griffiths of Weatherglass Books for hosting the winner's announcement event at Foyles on April 1st, and for founding this unique prize for small presses a decade ago.
I very much admired Anthony Shapland's taut, lyrical & political debut novel, A Room Above A Shop. Here's my review in the Guardian
In a Deep Blue Hour by Peter Stamm (translated by Michael Hofmann) is a very good novel about a novelist. Read my review in the TLS here
