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Theme

Intimacy

Reviews examining emotional dependency, sexual negotiation and the long, difficult labour of attachment.

Reviews filed under this theme.

Na Zhong

Three

A daughter returns to her hometown after years abroad and finds her ageing parents living a life she no longer shares.

Vincenzo Latronico

Perfection

Two people who sell difference for a living, and the uncle’s farmhouse that turns out to be funding it.

Ping Lu

To the East of the East

A husband gone to Macau under another man's name, explaining himself in letters that reach his wife too late.

Marie Darrieussecq

How to Make a Woman

Two accounts of the same fifteen years, measuring what one woman inherits against what the other improvises across the road.

Luke Kennard

Black Bag

A failed actor paid to sit in a leather bag, drawing more notice hidden than his face ever earned.

Claire Keegan

Foster

A summer of care staged as rescue, ending in a child carrying a measure her own family need never meet.

Rozie Kelly

Kingfisher

A debut novel follows a writer’s affair with an older woman, turning desire, illness and care into a question of who controls the record.

Karl Ove Knausgård

Arendal

One night failing to get home. Thirty years failing to get anywhere further.

Erinrose Mager

Hot Fruit

Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.

Ezra Palmer Featured

Handsome

A novel of marriage, memory and Alzheimer's narrated by a woman whose case against her husband survives her failing mind.