SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
A case of conflicted loyalties
PAUL SIMON recommends a novel exploring the conflicts between class and gender politics in Edinburgh at the turn of the last century
A sunset over Edinburgh, the setting for Kate Hunter's novel
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
The Caseroom
by Kate Hunter
(Fledgling Press, £9.99)
SET in the Leonards and Canonmills areas of Edinburgh, the protagonist of Kate Hunter's The Caseroom is Iza Ross, whom we meet as she is about to start work at a printing firm as a compositor. It is through her eyes, somewhat naive at first but increasingly aware of the underlying issues determining her life, that Hunter immerses the reader in the city at all levels.
This is an Edinburgh that heaves and swells with industrial tensions, the determined rise of the women’s suffrage movement and an anxiety over the growing Irish independence movement.
At the same time, Iza is preoccupied by the impact of these themes in microcosm as they play out among the workers’ fights for more pay, a reactionary attempt to bar women from employment and her affair with the young dashing Roddy Mac, an associate of the great James Connolly, who makes an important appearance in her life.
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