But now, after having spent enough time in the ring, in the day to day grunt of fashioning people, places, and things out of thin air and exposing them to the elements to see how they fare or what comes of them—I know better than to assume what works in one exceedingly popular medium won’t apply to another. As The Office, Sopranos, and The Bear have shown us time and again, TV might just be the best writing teacher we didn’t know we needed.
If you find sufficient pleasure in satire and meta-narrative to dispense with old-fashioned relationships with characters, and are not put off by a Hampstead sex romp via holidays in Italy, this is a well-wrought and very clever book.
Sarah Langan's A Better World is one of those novels that burrow under your skin a little deeper with each chapter until you feel profoundly unsettled but also incapable of turning away. A very sinister thriller with a dash of science-fiction and full of inscrutabilities, this novel about a mother trying to save her family from a dying world is as entreating and creepy as it is timely and humane.
Burnside has here, I am certain of this at least, written a poem to keep by you, to dwell in, to make the reader think and feel at the same time, as one does when reading a Shakespeare comedy or an ode by Keats. There is magic here, sometimes troubling magic, but there is also good, illuminating sense. It appeals to the ear, to the mind, and to the spirit, and you will harvest more with successive readings.
If O’Hagan’s novel wants to offer us a glimpse of contemporary London, it hasn’t quite decided whether it is a window or a funhouse mirror. But it captures something of its dazzling and tricksy reflective surfaces, its winking outward charm, and the mouldering core beneath.
Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.