ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
Latest editorial
Lyrical search for meaning in an unknowable world
Fireflies and Star Trails
[Mike Lewinski]
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
Fireflies
by Luis Sagasti
(Charco Press, £8.99)
“THE WORLD is a ball of wool. A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.” That's how Luis Sagasti's ambitious novel Fireflies, a quest to find meaning in literature and life, begins.
Retelling a fantastical history of the world, the book, translated by Fionn Petch, is written in a highly lyrical form and it's refreshingly experimental in its structure as it weaves through stories and anecdotes of the famous and the infamous.
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