Review

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar review – survival in a climate-ravaged Kolkata 

This article is more than 1 month old

This moral thriller offers a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Keshava Guha

Mon 26 Jan 2026 

The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.

The Correspondent Is an Epistolary Novel for the Social Media Age

 

The Correspondent Is an Epistolary Novel for the Social Media Age

Virginia Evans’ debut book was a surprise hit. After reading it, I think I understand why.

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

BY REBECCA ONION 

JAN 29, 202612:35 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Amazon.

One of the biggest literary hits of 2025 seemingly came out of nowhere. The Correspondent, the debut book of Virginia Evans, an unpublished author who had previously written seven unsold novels, was published in April, but it wasn’t until December that it made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction. (After 13 weeks on the list, it now sits at No. 3.) The novel’s slowly building dominance—“one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025,” the New York Times called it—is the stuff of fairy tales, dangerously encouraging for every other unpublished author out there.

BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

Heart the Lover by Lily King review – a love story to treasure

This article is more than 4 months old

A companion novel to the brilliant Writers & Lovers, this delightfully witty tale of college romance matures into midlife poignancy

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Rebecca Wait

Thursday 30 October 2025

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

 

Khara Pringle Photography

Wendy Erskine: ‘What made me want to write stories was that I didn’t see the world, as I saw it, reflected in much fiction’

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by Sarah Gill
14th Nov 2025

Earlier this year, short story maestro Wendy Erskine released her debut novel, The Benefactors, a title which has been shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the An Post Book Awards. Here, the Belfast author discusses her process, her inspirations, and how an advert on Facebook kickstarted her career in writing.

Wendy Erskine / “Why I find profoundity in the lives of ordinary East Belfast people’

 

Wendy Erskine

WENDY ERSKINE: “Why I find profoundity in the lives of ordinary East Belfast people’

by Joanne Savage
15 October 2021

The author of the critically lauded short story collection Sweet Home and stylish head of English at Strathearn Grammar chats to JOANNE SAVAGE about finding the extraordinary in the quotidian

Interview with Wendy Erskine

Wendy Erskine

Interview with Wendy Erskine

Wendy Erskine’s short story collection Sweet Home (2018 Stinging Fly, 2019 Picador) won the Butler Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill and Republic of Consciousness prizes and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her story ‘Inakeen’ was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, while her stories and non-fiction have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She hosts a show on Soho Radio for Rough Trade Books and is also a full-time secondary school teacher. Her new collection Dance Move will be published by Stinging Fly and Picador in early 2022.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast

This article is more than 8 months old

The acclaimed short-story writer brings her characters vividly to life in this debut novel about a teenage girl’s assault and its aftermath

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Sam Byers

Mon 16 Jun 2025

That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don’t get lost in the space.

 

Wendy Erskine

REVIEW

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine review – a propulsive second collection 

This article is more than 4 years old

Set in Belfast, these pleasurable stories of magical thinking and unlived lives go straight to the emotional core

Leo Robson

Thu 24 Feb 2022

The stories of the Northern Irish writer Wendy Erskine, though colloquial and streetwise, are largely traditional in approach. She doesn’t mess the reader around. There are no games or tics, unless you count a taste for the adjective “sleek”. The titles in Dance Move, her propulsive and pleasurable second collection, tend to identify a character or characters (Mrs Dallesandro, Gloria and Max) or an emotional atmosphere (Memento Mori), dabbling at their most extreme in the meta-fictional (Bildungsroman) or double-edged – Nostalgie refers both to a song and the emotions it stirs, Cell to a faction and the virtual imprisonment entailed by membership. Even when Erskine begins with an unexplained allusion (“the night before”) or glimmer of intrigue (a man saying something not “entirely true”), the facts straighten themselves out soon enough, and just as often a situation is set down with unselfconscious baldness: “He was there as visiting professor of film”, “For the last nine years Linda and Rae had been having a takeaway together on a Friday night”.

 

Review

Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine review – a gripping short-story debut

This article is more than 6 years old

Dark memories haunt these acutely observed portraits of love, loneliness and everyday ennui in Belfast

Lara Pawson

Thursday 27 June 2019

They hook you in hard, the people whose lives fill Wendy Erskine’s debut collection, but you wouldn’t want to trade places with any of them. To borrow from the balding man in a grey jacket, who makes a brief appearance commenting on the music of a fictional Belfast rocker in the penultimate story, each of these acutely observed portraits “penetrates to the heart of what it means to be lonely, or in love or to feel a failure”. An exceptional ear for dialogue, an impeccable semantic rhythm and an uncanny ability to tease laughter out of the darkest moments mean Erskine is perfectly poised to stare, unflinching, into our neoliberal abyss. The result is a gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour.

 

Review

The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal review – the power of kindness

This article is more than 10 months old

Love and loss combine in this tender tale of how a mourning Caribbean mother cares for others

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Colin Grant
Wednesday 9 April 2025

Reflecting on his childhood in the autobiographical novel In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming wrote that it was “my mother who really fathered me”. Damningly, the Barbadian novelist asserted that his father “had only fathered the idea of me”. That notion of children being left mainly, if not solely, the liability of mothers still widely resonates in Caribbean households. In Kit de Waal’s tender novel, The Best of Everything, the protagonist Paulette, a single mother, embraces the role not just of mothering and largely fathering her son, but also selflessly acting as a proxy mother to a child who risks being abandoned.