Life in Middlemarch is a study in provincial life, indeed. Young Dorothea Brooke has high hopes in life, but soon settles in marriage. As it turns out, her much older…
Fiction
Book Review: Mrs Dalloway
Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal…
Book Review: The Alchemist
The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King’s Men, it is generally considered Jonson’s best and most characteristic comedy. Deploying the…
Book Review: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
At a party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed – again. She’s been murdered hundreds of times, and each day, Aiden Bishop is too late to save…
Book Review: This Love by Dani Atkins
Sophie Winter lives in a self-imposed cocoon – she’s a single, thirty-one year old translator who works from home in her one bedroom flat. This isn’t really the life she…
Book Review: The Bloody Chamber
Next to Du Maurier, Angela Carter is one of my all-time favourite storytellers. Her masterpiece The Bloody Chamber sees Carter spin subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales…
Book Review: Doctor Faustus
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly known simply as Doctor Faustus, is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe. Based on German stories about the…
Book Review: The Good Soldier
Wealthy American John Dowell describes in a disarmingly casual, compellingly intimate manner how he and his wife Florence meet an English couple in a German spa resort. They become friends…
Book Review: Wide Sargasso Sea
Born into an oppressive colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage, disturbing rumours begin to…