This is Hollinghurst‘s sixth novel & in terms of structure is very similar to his previous one ‘The Stranger‘s Child‘. It is divided into five sections, spanning wartime Oxford to modern day London. It reminded me a bit of ‘A Dance To The Music of Time‘ in that the characters fade in and out of the action over the course of the book - for example the ‘star‘ of the first section is barely seen or heard of in the other 4 sections.

Aftermath (Art in the Wake of World War One) is the catalogue of the current Tate Britain exhibition. It‘s a fascinating period to study with some British artists I like alongside French & German artists.
The exhibition demonstrates how the war influenced artists long after the armistice in 1918 - and offers a nice additional perspective to the existing literature out there e.g. the books of - say - Philipp Blom.

A short story published for McEwan‘s 70th birthday...

I‘ve always been incredibly wary of ‘The Great American Novel‘ - I‘ve huffed & puffed through a few & the likes of Mailer, Bellow, Roth & Updike are almost complete strangers to me. I shouldn‘t have worried though...I absolutely devoured it. It weaves a story set in 3 main time frames (The Chicago Riots of 1968, the late 80s and the Occupy Wall Street period) with great ease & style. I‘m prepared to forgive this novel anything.

This is a selection of articles from the Guardian not from a calendar year but from October to October. Given the hundreds of articles that can appear every day it‘s almost an impossible task to boil them down to a representative sample. So every edition has the imprint of the selected editor. There are articles about the usual suspect plus some more surprising ones - I was surprised to see an article about my old home town Pontypool appear.