MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
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‘So familiar and yet so unfathomable’
If 17th-century Dutch art is your thing this must be your book, believes MICHAL BONCZA
ENIGMATIC: Carel Fabritius’ View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall
[Kotomi_/CC] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
Thunderclap: A memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
by Laura Cummings
Chatto and Windus £12.99
THE thunderclap of the title was a gunpowder explosion on October 12 1654, which devastated the city of Delft killing over a hundred and leaving thousands injured. Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt van Rijn’s most promising apprentice.
Fabritius holds a special fascination for Laura Cummings as does his View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, painted two years before his death (at the National Gallery, London): “for pictures can shore you up, remind you of who you are and what you stand for.”
More from this author
MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray
Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
New releases from Hannah Rose Platt, Kemp Harris, and Spear Of Destiny
