MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
Latest editorial
Letters From Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Mexican Brenda Navarro and Argentinean Claudia Pineiro and of poetry by Nicaraguan-Costa Rican Lester Gomez Medina
CAREFUL CRAFTSMAN: Nicaraguan-Costa Rican writer Lester Gomez Medina
MARTIN HALL examines the way the Roman orator took on different schools of philosophy
ALEX HALL is amused at the way the UFOs appear exactly where commercial interests, conspiracies, militarism and right-wing media overlap
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Eagles Of The Republic, The Balloonists, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history
EMPTY HOUSES (Daunt Books, £9.99), Mexican writer Brenda Navarro’s first novel, is the devastating story of a mother who loses her small child in a playground somewhere in Mexico and her relentless search to find him.
It is also the story of a working-class woman who has kidnapped the child in order to fulfil her maternal desires and, fittingly, the chapters begin with epigraphs from the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska that set the tone for what it is yet to come.
The narrative alternates between the harrowing stories of these two desperate woman as they try to make sense of motherhood, mental and physical abuse and trauma in a novel that questions maternal instincts in patriarchies and the place of women in modern society.
Similar stories
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
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family
RITA DI SANTO reports on the films from Iran, Spain, Belgium and Brazil that won the top awards
FIONA O'CONNOR recommends a biography that is a beautiful achievement and could stand as a manifesto for the power of subtlety in art