The author and podcaster on taking inspiration from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, welling up to Charles Dickens, and the enduring appeal of Jane Austen
My earliest reading memory At a secondhand book sale at school, a kind teacher recommended my mum buy Brian Jacques’s Redwall. Noble monastic mice battle thuggish rats: catnip for a seven-year-old.
My favourite book growing up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The mad robots and two-headed aliens are great for the teenage brain, but beneath all that is the sadness, and the questions about why life has to be like this, all filtered through poor Arthur Dent. I sometimes pull it off the shelf to read half a page, just to remind myself how comedy writing is done.
The two-time Miles Franklin winner adds the $60,000 prize for women and nonbinary writers to her accolades, for a novel that troubles the line between fiction and memoir
“I wouldn’t say I set out to break forms, as to invent new ones,” Michelle de Kretser says of her novel Theory and Practice, winner of the $60,000 Stella prize for women and non-binary writers. “I wanted to write a novel where the reader thinks it isn’t a novel because I’m using nonfictional devices and forms.”
Tricksy and sly, Theory and Practice – the Australian author’s eighth novel – troubles the line between fiction and memoir. It opens with several pages of another ostensibly unrelated novel that is abandoned in its early stages; the reader simply turns a page and is confronted with the line: “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.” What comes after seems suspiciously like memoir – particularly to anyone vaguely familiar with de Kretser’s biography – following a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman studying English literature at Melbourne University in the 1980s.
The critic turned author’s witty, eccentric novel follows a Londoner reading Susan Sontag and looking for love
Early on in Leo Robson’s debut novel, the narrator, a likable, aimless, rather detached young Londoner named Johnny Voghel, reads “a book of Susan Sontag essays and interviews”. Johnny’s copy of what he later identifies as A Susan Sontag Reader is an heirloom. It has been extensively underlined by his mother, who has just died, and by his estranged half-brother Lawrence. Johnny wonders if reading Sontag, or his family’s other heavily annotated books, will “unlock a secret or hint at one, offer a glimpse of their dreams or invite them into mine”.
A Susan Sontag Reader includes Sontag’s 1968 defence of Jean-Luc Godard, the great modernist and Marxist provocateur of French New Wave cinema. If Johnny, in search of family connection, happened to read that essay, he would encounter a paragraph that rather neatly describes the novel that he is in the process of narrating. Godard’s films, Sontag writes, “show an interrelated group of fictional characters located in a recognisable, consistent environment: in his case, usually contemporary and urban”. But “while the sequence of events in a Godard film suggests a fully articulated story, it doesn’t add up to one […] actions are often opaque, and fail to issue into consequences”.
Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on the novel Box Hill so, misgivings riding alongside, it felt right for the author to motorbike to the film festival for its premiere
I set out on my motorbike for Cannes on the morning of 16 May, a distance of about 450 miles, having booked a room in Montpellier so as to break the journey and take my own sweet time. It’s not often that anyone’s books are the basis of a “queer biker movie” premiering at the only film festival everyone has heard of, let alone one of mine – I felt I owed it to myself to make an entrance in style.
Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on my novel Box Hill, published in 2020. When the option was acquired I didn’t see how a consciously disorienting first-person narrative could work on the screen, but I was happy for him to try. At one point I was told, through my agent, that everyone was happy with the first two acts of Harry’s draft, but the third needed work. After three years it was up to me to decide whether the project should go ahead. Conscientiously Yasmin McDonald, then at United Agents, itemised some drastic divergences. My 18-year-old narrator Colin was now 35 when he met the glamorous biker Ray, though still living with his parents, and Ray didn’t die as he does in the book but simply disappeared from Colin’s life. I flinched when I heard about these changes. Would the next phone call let me know that Olivia Colman had agreed to take on the demanding role of Ray? Nevertheless I said yes. I couldn’t imagine pulling the plug on a project that someone had spent far more time adapting than I had spent writing it.
The year is 1850, the eve of the Crimean war, and Florence Nightingale is watching a group of boys at play. From a distance, she composes the scene, preparing to describe it in a letter to her aunt. “How did she want this part to sound?” she wonders – less concerned with what is happening than how it might be narrated. When she realises the boys are not kicking a ball but tormenting a baby owl, she doesn’t recoil. The horror of the image lands alongside another realisation: the story “might be better” now, though she is left considering how best to reframe the violence for her aunt: “Knowing she would narrate it later back in the house … Florence would have to tell the story a different way”. That instinct – to reshape the unbearable into something legible – sits at the core of Nightingale, Laura Elvery’s rich and exacting novel about violence, care and memory.
In 1910, a young English soldier, Silas Bradley, appears on Florence’s doorstep, claiming they met during the Crimean war half a century before. He’s confused, searching for answers about lives that looped briefly and painfully around his own; his appearance also forces Florence to confront ghosts in her own past.
Facing homelessness and incurable illness, a couple sets out on a 630-mile hike in this lyrical memoir read by the author
A few days after Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, had their Welsh farm repossessed owing to a failed investment, Moth learned he had a rare and incurable neurodegenerative condition. With their world upended and nowhere to live, the couple decided there was only one course of action: to walk.
Their plan was to follow the South West Coast Path, a hiking trail taking them from Minehead in Somerset, along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, around Land’s End and Lizard Point, then back along Cornwall’s south coast, south Devon and ending in Poole in Dorset. The 630-mile walk, taking in secluded beaches and coves, wild moorland and quiet hamlets and coastal towns, is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest four times over. Armed with the essentials – clothes, a tent, sleeping bags, endless packets of dried noodles – they would be “sleeping wild, living wild, working our way through every painful action that had brought us here, to this moment”.
Après le président Snow, c'est au tour d'Haymitch d'être le héros de son propre préquel, nommé Lever de soleil sur la moisson. Casting, date de sortie, histoire... Voici tout ce que l'on sait déjà sur le prochain film de la saga Hunger Games.
Après le président Snow, c'est au tour d'Haymitch d'être le héros de son propre préquel, nommé Lever de soleil sur la moisson. Casting, date de sortie, histoire... Voici tout ce que l'on sait déjà sur le prochain film de la saga Hunger Games.
Alternate political realities are compellingly explored in this sinister vision of a children’s home – but the echoes of Ishiguro are just too strong
In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child’s-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women’s prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a “found” novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman’s life over a year. The Axeman’s Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand’s most prestigious prize twice.
The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her “first foray into dystopian fiction” and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey’s alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps.
Translator Deepa Bhasthi’s pick of 12 of Mushtaq’s ‘life-affirming’ tales about women’s lives in southern India becomes the first short story collection to win the £50,000 award
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India.
Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, Heart Lamp’s 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period.
La Nintendo Switch 2 est disponible en précommande depuis le début du mois d'avril chez de nombreux revendeurs. Cette nouvelle console sort le 5 juin et il existe un moyen de l'avoir en premier. Voici comment faire.
In recent years, Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios have established themselves as the masters of a certain unique brand of co-op-focused games, including 2018’s prison-escape adventure A Way Out and 2021’s family-drama-infused multi-genre extravaganza It Takes Two. The latter ended up becoming a surprise smash hit, selling over 23 million copies worldwide, so anticipation and expectations are high for Hazelight’s latest co-op venture, Split Fiction. Does Split Fiction double down on Hazelight's recent success? Or have they gone to this particular well too many times? Time to find out if this one's a co-optimal experience. Split Fiction casts you […]
Depuis l’absence des PlayStation Showcase (Sony en referra-t-il un jour ?), les State of Play ont pris de l’ampleur. Et celui de février 2025 était particulièrement riche en contenu. Si vous pouvez retrouver toutes les annonces faites à cette adresse, nous vous avons préparé un best-of des jeux qu’il fallait retenir dans le dernier épisode.
Résumé du State of Play de Février 2025
Pour tout savoir sur SAROS, futur jeu de Housemarque (Returnal) : direction cet article
MindsEye est le prochain jeu de Leslie Benzies, ex producteur des GTA. Pour tout savoir, direction cet article
Tides of Annihilation surfe sur la vague des jeux Action / Aventure en vogue en Asie. Une belle prouesse graphique qui nous offre un univers apparemment très riche. Sortie non connue, sur PS5 et PC uniquement
Days Gone Remastered est maintenant officiel ! Sortie prévue le 25 avril 2025 sur PS5, avec une optimisation PS5 Pro.
Dreams of Another est un jeu indépendant surprenant. Sortie sur PS5 et PC et compatible PSVR2, en 2025
Lies of P: Overture est un DLC pour l’aventure de base. Sortie dans le courant de l’été 2025 sur PC, PS5 et Xbox
Hell is Us nous avait déjà fait de l’oeil en 2024. Il confirme aujourd’hui sa sortie sur PC, PS5 et Xbox pour le 4 Septembre 2025
Nouvelle vidéo impressionnante pour le remake de MGS3. Sortie prévue le 28 août 2025
Le retour de Onimusha se fera en 2026 !
Supermassive Games sera présent pour Halloween 2025 avec Directive 8020. Sortie le 2 octobre 2025 sur PC, PS5 et Xbox
Split Fiction annonce sa sortie : le 6 mars 2025 ! Aventure coop à faire à deux, par les papas de A Way Out et It Takes Two
Borderlands 4 se dévoile, et avec une date de sortie fixée au 23 septembre 2025 sur PC, PS5 et Xbox !
Fait principalement par un seul homme, Lost Soul Aside annonce sa sortie pour le 30 mai 2025 sur PS5 et PC uniquement
Un nouveau Sonic Racing sera de sortie prochainement sur PC et consoles ! Pas de date pour le moment
La légende Shinobi sera de retour sur PC et consoles le 29 août 2025 !
Et enfin, Capcom dévoile la feuille de route pour les extensions de Monster Hunter: Wilds, de sortie le 28 février 2025
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