Fiona Wright

Abandon Every Hope takes the form of a thanatography – an attempt to write death – which Hayley Singer describes as having a “nearness to biography”. What biography does for a life, that is, thanatography might do for death, although …

“How are they losing their children like this, all over the country?” asks an Afghan cameleer as he passes through the town of Fairly, where The Sun Walks Down is set. Days earlier, the farmhand Billy considers the fear that “a lost child” …

Driving his young daughters home from school, Limberlost’s protagonist, Ned, stumbles through an accidental telling of an anecdote from childhood. The details, for which his children press him, suddenly feel distant, strange. Ned is struck …

The most striking and satisfying feature of Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story is its beautiful prose. The writing is rich: rhythmic and atmospheric, with a sharp clarity to its depictions of domestic, family life and the ways in which the sudden …

There are a number of refrains that recur across The Mirror Book, Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir about growing up within her literary family, subjected always to its “fictions”. Some are the kind of phrases we use or hear so frequently that …

“You would have said, remember that the opening exchanges are just rituals: how you are, what you’ve been up to, the weather, the traffic – it isn’t all that important what any of you say, it’s just the saying itself that matters. It’s not seeking …”

“Up here, the cold permeates. It presses against you and breathes itself back in. You like the way it stings your fingers, how every inch of your body is forced to feel. Arterial, the roads pulse you along, each town you pass fleeting and unacknowledged. …”

“You know I dated a masseur once? Or, what’s the word, masseuse? Does anybody ever say that? What, masseuse? Yes. Masseuse. No, it’s definitely – If you say lady masseur, I’ll – Okay, masseuse. When was this? A …”

“A waiting room. It’s mid-afternoon, a Monday, and the chairs are hard blue plastic. Mostly young women today, red-eyed babies on their knees, all busy rustling through their handbags for plastic containers of sultanas or carrot sticks. The babies have …”

A visit to the home of artist Wendy Whiteley.