KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
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I Never Left Home by Margaret Randall
Engrossing memoir from radical writer and feminist
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
NADIA JOSEPH welcomes a survey of the role that TV played in the debate over apartheid and race relations in Britain
“BEFORE memory fades completely, I have a few things I want to say,” writes Margaret Randall in this memoir – and what she has to say is certainly of great interest.
A poet, oral historian, essayist and translator, she has produced over 150 books and, although she has written about her life before, I Never Left Home is her assessment of it now from the perspective of her 83 years.
Determined to be creative and free from the restrictions of the conventional life her parents envisaged for her, in the early 1960s Randall joined the New York arts scene and went on to found a leftist arts journal in Mexico before fleeing the country without a passport in a refrigerated meat truck.
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RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
SALEEM BADAT and VASU REDDY introduce a new book about an outstanding interpreter of the world, and an activist scholar committed to changing society