Gardens feature in every genre of Roman literature, from obscene epigrams to dry agricultural treatises, though often in the background or on the margins – as the setting for Cicero’s philosophical ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

This follow-up to Bookworm (2018), Lucy Mangan’s memoir about the books she read in childhood, chronicles some of the reading that has provided entertainment and solace in her adult life, particularly ...

The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the raw isolation of humankind”. She then retreated to an isolation of her own ...

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old ...

Caroline Moorehead salutes the energetic brilliance of the singer Josephine Baker and Aaron Peck discusses the past, present and future of the avant garde Margaret Drabble explores how Dickens drew on ...

“Few passions are constant, but many are sincere”. The maxim is by the Marquis de Vauvenargues, one-time proprietor of the Provençal chateau where Pablo Picasso and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, ...

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The Eerie Book is a compendium of supernatural short stories and extracts, edited by the Scottish author Margaret Armour in 1898 and beautifully reproduced with a new introduction by the super­natural ...

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

Agustina Bazterrica’s novels place the reader, again and again, at the end of the world. Her subjects are loss and monstrosity, societal breakdown and its aftermath. Her characters are tolerant of ...