It is clear from July’s Riveting Reviews that our contributors have been responding to the UK’s first extreme heat warning in the most appropriate way: by reading.
It is with pleasure that we trumpet the return of the inimitable Caroline Wyatt – a regular on our screens and radios as a BBC journalist, she contributes the occasional feature-length review. This time her reading of Victoria Mas’s The Mad Women’s Ball prompts an account of her own time in Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital.
Our Riveter-in-Chief has been busy: Rosie Goldsmith provides two reviews this month – of Helene Flood’s psych-thriller debut, and Sandro Veronesi’s second Premio Strega win (the Italian Booker).
The other Rosie – my deputy reviews editor – was persuaded to take on the French verse-novel sensation by Joseph Ponthus, and is very glad of it, while I am equally delighted to review another Natalia Ginzburg (that’s two in a row).
Paul Burke is back, this time enthusing about the latest Helga Flatland family drama, and Dymphna Flynn examines a new translation of a classic from the ‘Greek Ferrante’.
Jennifer Sarha is roused to anger by poet Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s debut novel, and our resident Spanish expert, Alice Banks, is effusive about a new short-story collection from Teresa Solana.
And where would we be without our authority on all things crime fiction, Barry Forshaw? He might surprise you this month, with a review of one of Zola’s classics – nothing like a chunky nineteenth-century tome to get your teeth into on the beach.
Enjoy these insights and reflections, and please remember our contributors provide them for free. Pay them in kind for us, please, by sharing these reviews as widely as you can.
Till August…
—West Camel
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July 2021 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.