Upcoming events

The Rising Down, Lives in a Sussex Landscape: An Evening with Alexandra Harris

16th April, 2024, Steyning Methodist Church

Latest reviews

    February, 2024

  • Wilding: The New Illustrated Guide by Isabella Tree
    read more
  • August, 2022

  • The Night Ship by Jess Kidd
    read more
  • July, 2022

  • The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
    read more
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
    read more
  • Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon
    read more
  • Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal
    read more
  • The Promise by Damon Galgut
    read more

The Illuminations

By

Andrew O'Hagan

illuminations by Andrew O'Hagan

Longlisted for the Booker prize, this thoughtful and engaging novel, Andrew O’Hagan’s fifth, explores with a fresh voice universal themes of age, memory, war and love. Former documentary photographer Ann lives in sheltered accommodation in Ayrshire, while her grandson Luke serves in Afghanistan encountering in real life the scenarios that he and his war fodder contemporaries relished on Xbox games. When he returns disillusioned and trying to forget the disturbing scenes that he has experienced (robustly described by O’Hagan), he finds himself tasked with helping his grandmother, in contrast, retrieve past memories and long-kept secrets and questions of veracity in image and recall gain an added resonance.
It’s a measure of O’Hagan’s compassion that after balancing these stories of war and family – braving the battlefield and braving the passing of time – the ultimate note is hopeful and almost gentle, of something that seems real and vital. The Guardian