MARIA GOULDING reviews Samantha Harvey’s prize winning Orbital, a novel that casts a distant eye on humanity’s smash and grab impact on planet Earth, a book of rare lyrical beauty and profound sadness that may just be what we need in these turbulent times....
With conflict brewing on the Russia-Ukraine border, and talk of an ‘unthinkable’ war in Europe, MARIA GOULDING turned to ‘one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time’, a book that speaks the unspeakable, and finds truth in the aftermath of horror....
Politicians of all shades trumpet the ideal of social mobility as a mark of a fair society. It’s a claim picked apart by Selina Todd in her rich and compelling new book, Snakes and Ladders. MARIA GOULDING is impressed by a powerful manifesto for change....
MARIA GOULDING reviews Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other – an interwoven tale of diversity and race that has much to teach us about the need for tolerance in modern Britain. ...
Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered in the run-up to the US election was a sobering and resonant experience, says MARIA GOULDING. It’s a story centred on a dilapidated old house, a powerful image for an American society struggling to overcome its legacy of lies, injustice and inequality....
MARIA GOULDING reflects on Ali Smith’s recently completed series of seasonal novels, an interwoven quartet written and published each year since the Brexit referendum. They are, she says, ‘both enjoyable and serious novels for our times’....
For MARIA GOULDING, John Clare’s poetry is not only uplifting and restorative, but deeply relevant in our age of environmental uncertainty and social unease....
MARIA GOULDING reviews The Overstory by Richard Powers – probably ‘the best novel ever written about trees’, a tale with a compelling political message for our lockdown times. The characters and narrative are engrossing, and the big themes are of urgent contemporary relevance....