Simon’s Cat started off life as an internet animation that developed a cult following. The short films featuring a hungry cat on Youtube gained enough viewers to interest Canongate publishing,...
Iain Banks’ new book is of a sort that Iain M Banks could have put his name to – because this book, though it has a (sort of) contemporary setting,...
Reviews written for the paperback edition of this entertaining biography are pre-empted by the fact that Gray himself has written his own review of the book in the Guardian. Gray...
Agnes Owens’ novellas are finally collected in the one place – and a good thing too, because they’re brilliant. The novella is an odd form: it’s usually about 50 to...
Yes, that Nick Cave, musician extraordinaire. This isn’t his first foray into fiction – he scripted a well-received film, the Australian Western (or bushman flick) The Proposition some years back,...
Jane McKie’s collection is largely about nature, and the poems here certainly seem charged with meaning. But in many of these poems McKie seems to be more intuitive than instructive...
This is a poker memoir, a genre that has grown unexpectedly in recent years with the general boom in gambling. The classics of this genre are Al Alvarez’s The Biggest...
This slim volume is a cult book waiting to happen. For starters, David Eagleman is described on the jacket as a ‘neuroscientist and writer’, a curious combination. The book itself...
Remember The Da Vinci Code? Consider this the antidote. In The Fire Gospel Michael Faber has fun satirizing that book and its horrible ilk. His plot involves a translator called...
David Lynch’s 2001 film added much to the surreal and schizophrenic nature of Mulholland Drive, a long and winding beauty spot outside Hollywood, and home to many of the movie...
Lennox is, we are promised, the first book in a series about a ‘fixer’ in 1950s Glasgow, by author Craig Russell who once served as a police officer in Scotland....
Bruce Lee is a deserving subject of an essential guide but this just isn’t essential enough. Lee brought a dancer’s grace to martial arts and the martial arts movie –...
This is Moffat's first novel, and it shows. Daisychain focuses on the trials of Logan Finch, and the death of his former lover and long lost daughter, set against the...
Alan Coren was familiar to many from TV and radio panel shows up until his death in 2007. He was a very funny man in those, and he is a...
This is a book about a 24 year old girl in the big city. However, the girl, Ahleme, is an Algerian immigrant living in Paris, and this makes a big...
This is an update of a 2001 printing of this book, a comprehensive guide to master graphic novelist Alan Moore. The book’s approach is, roughly, to tell Moore’s life story,...
The Merry Muses of Caledonia is Robert Burns’ collected ‘racy’ poems. But not exactly, because some of them are simply poems or songs Burns collected himself and some are only...
This is a fairly standard biography that’s lifted above the norm by having a fascinating subject. Public Enemy are one of the greatest hip hop acts ever, and that’s because...
Everybody says they know an eccentric, but most of these supposed oddballs don’t really rate. The lead character of this book, Jim Rath, is the kind of eccentric that everyone...
After his first book, Homicide, a Year on the Killing Streets looked at the lives of a squad of detectives in Baltimore, David Simon chose to take a different perspective...
