OXFORD REVIEW 
of BOOKS

Simon Alderwick reviews: AGIMAT by Romalyn Ante, Small Undetectable Thefts by Yanita Georgieva and All the Pretty Lights by Gerry McGrath

In 2003, when she was diagnosed with cancer, Annie Ernaux found that she could not write.

Kafka’s protagonists, both human and animal, often find themselves caged.

Hourani’s poetry is as meditative as it is proactive: it finds in the poet’s prerogative to organise a method of resistance. 

Sally Rooney’s new book wriggles under new (and old) constraints.

Ottilie Ethel Leopoldine Herbert, Countess of Carnarvon, had knockout feet. Few who saw them in action would deny it.

Kim’s debut chapbook Invisible Cartographies, published September 2024 by New Delta Review, is perhaps a collection of thundereggs.

Elias Canetti asks if language is the barrier to understanding some kind of universal mortality.

Leslie Jamison’s Splinters was released at the end of February to enormous fanfare.

Under the sombre sky of a rainy city centre, vibrant flags in black, red, green, and white hues stood out distinctly

...as she bore both a personal and reportorial witness to the labour of “dying, when one loves life so much.”

Rushdie and Shatz merge in their interest in cosmopolitanism and exile, in the fact of finding oneself between identities...

‘We expect extinction after people arrive on an island…survival is the exception.’

Truths needn’t always depend upon facts for their expression’. So says Tom Crewe, in the Afterword to The New Life.

‘We paint our toenails red, though we put shoes on our feet so no one will see our flashy toes.'

Love poetry is a risky business. Maggie Millner in her debut Couplets: A Love Story (2023) seems all too aware of this.

The original function of the novel, V.S. Naipaul once suggested, was to give us news: to provide society with a very clear idea of itself.

As we read through Sensitive to Temperature, it becomes clear that the relationships therein are indeed sensitive to temperature.

SARAH MOORHOUSE - Both Starnone and Ferrante are interested in our imperfect understanding of others.

PHILIPPA CONLON - ‘Imitation’, we are told, ‘is the sincerest form of flattery’.