CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
Ironopolis
by Glen James Brown
(Parthian £8.99)
BY ANY measure, Ironopolis is an extraordinary novel. Glen James Brown’s debut work is breathtaking in its ambition and delivery.
Employing the testimonies of six different people living on a Middlesbrough estate and using a range of voices and letters, the author meshes together their shared histories over a number of decades.
Glasgow will remember the martyrs of the 1787 strike this weekend in speech and song, their spirit is sorely needed today, writes JIM LISTER
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class



