Jarred McGinnis’s debut novel The Coward, reviewed in the Guardian:
“Jarred’s days of being wheeled to the doughnut shop by his father, or flirting in vain with a barista named Sarah, are juxtaposed with his wild past of hopping boxcars and getting into bar fights: the result is unbearably poignant. The only way Jarred can survive it is with a lacerating gallows humour. Gags and merciless asides abound, all laced with the bitter truth of experience: ‘Paraplegia isn’t just the golden ticket to great parking and people’s condescension,’ he quips early on… The Coward is a truly uplifting emotional journey; a tender, wise, brutally funny novel that assiduously avoids the saccharine.”
Guardian
(M)otherhood in the Observer:
“In (M)otherhood, behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal wonders if a book questioning the parental self and society’s attitudes to that self needs to define itself either as memoir or as political writing: ‘Does it really have to sit in a box?’ Here is proof that it really doesn’t: this is an exhilarating, genre-defying read… The whole thing adds up to the most thoughtful, empathic and inspiring science of the self.”
Viv Groskop
Observer
Presenting: THE BOOK OF FORM & EMPTINESS The unforgettable new novel from @TheBookerPrizes-shortlisted author of A Tale For the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (@ozekiland). Pre-order via your local bookshop, or online at linktr.ee/thebook
Tattoos Helped Me Reclaim My Body After Years Of Trauma
Terri White, author of Coming Undone on how the pain and visibility of her tattoos helped her.
“Each tattoo was a fresh start. The needle that pounded and pricked, the ink that was dragged down into the dermis. My skin was reimagined, quite literally redrawn. When I looked in the mirror, when others looked at me, I was no longer the girl who was pared and peeled. I was the woman who said: ‘No more, never again. You won’t claim me, you can’t, because I’ve claimed myself.’”
Elle
Terri White has started a new Coming Undone podcast, named for her memoir, which is out in paperback tomorrow! In it she talks to people about their stories of struggle, and of putting themselves back together. The first episode is an interview with the Rev. Richard Coles. Download the podcast now, or listen on Spotify.
“It’s quite volatile, the photography scene [compared to] the canon in literature… the history of photography is always having to get written.”
Geoff Dyer in the Irish Times on his new book, See/Saw.
Irish Times
The Mauritanian is a new film starring Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch, directed by Kevin Macdonald. It’s based on Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s unflinching account of his fourteen years of detention without charge in Guantánamo Bay.
Robert Webb – author of How Not to be a Boy, star of Peep Show and statistically half of Mitchell & Webb – talks about his debut novel, Come Again, out now in paperback!
