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.
Theme
Intimacy
Reviews examining emotional dependency, sexual negotiation and the long, difficult labour of attachment.
Reviews filed under this theme.
Arendal
One night failing to get home. Thirty years failing to get anywhere further.
Hot Fruit
Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.
Handsome
A novel of marriage, memory and Alzheimer's narrated by a woman whose case against her husband survives her failing mind.
Box Hill
A six-year BDSM relationship written as a study of unequal access: a flat without a key, a man without a surname, a death without a grave.
The Land in Winter
During the winter of 1962–63, four people try to keep marriages, animals, patients and unborn children alive after the terms of their lives have begun to fail.
Country People
A warm, loose comedy of family, belief and Vermont eccentrics. Generously constructed, intermittently brilliant, and approximately one hundred pages too forgiving of itself.
I Make Envy on Your Disco
Nothing translates for Sam Singer in Berlin: not the signs, not the city, not what he cannot say to the man waiting in New York.
Learning
A teacher spends the day keeping children safe through small acts of care, until an outside threat exposes how quickly adult fear can break the rules meant to protect them.
A Thread of Silent Echoes
A debut about betrayal, coercion, family fracture and grief where they are actually lived: in markets, homes, clinics, roads, bars and on phone screens.
The Inclination
Tom McPherson constructs each scene as a pressure system: at the centre, something that cannot be named, around it each character’s method of avoidance. In West Berlin, 1972, permission operates as pressure.
Mare
A novel organised around shared care without claim, where repetition sharpens attention but external relations fail to hold pressure. Attachment turns inward and remains exposed.