Paula Bardell-Hedley

I’m not overfond of airports or aeroplanes – in fact, I would describe myself as having mild aviophobia – so tend, when flying, to struggle concentrating on a book for any length of time. I therefore take care always to slip something moderately light (in a literary sense) into my bag before leaving home in hope of distracting myself f...

This short but powerful novella is a minacious reflection on the brutality of war by the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans (1921-1995), whose most famous works include The House of Refuge (1952), The Darkroom of Damocles (1958) and Beyond Sleep (1966). Along with Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve, he was one of the three m...

I recall as a teenager watching grainy TV pictures of Lech Wałęsa, hero of Poland’s labour movement and head of the trade union group Solidarność (Solidarity), publicly addressing striking workers. At the time, the country was one of the least oppressive states in the Soviet Bloc, but things changed in 1981 when martial law was imposed by the authoritarian government and citizens were persecuted in order to crush politic...

We know from the first page of this disquieting novel that Leo Orlov, a Russian émigré and successful author living in the USA, was murdered in mysterious circumstances. We are in no doubt this incident took place because we see excerpts from a collection of ...

Having come straight from reading The Beekeeper of Sinjar, a collection of harrowing first-hand accounts of women taken captive by Daesh, to The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker’s reimagining of the legendary Trojan War from a female perspective, it was disconcertingly effortless to step from 21st century Iraq to 13th century BCE Greece. So little, it seems, has altered in parts of the world ...

This is the true story of Abdullah Sharem, an Iraqi beekeeper who saved the lives of Yazidi women sold into slavery by the Muslim fundamentalists known as Daesh, or Islamic State.
Sinjar is a town in the Nineveh Province of Iraq, close to Mount Shingal. We in the west were mostly ignorant of the ...

Matthew Janney, The Culture Trip’s UK Books Editor, wrote a timely piece earlier this year on the subject of Brexit literature, in which he described it as a new genre “reminiscent of classical 20th-century dystopian fiction”, but one that aimed to “narrativize the turbulent fallout of the [United Kingdom’s] 2016 referendum.” He saw this “volatile source of material” as an unending wellspring of inspiration, and suggested with conviction: “This is a space that fiction can own....

My routine was much as usual on the morning of Wednesday 14th June 2017: I arose early for work, fed the chickens, settled myself at the kitchen table for my first cuppa of the day and switched the TV on to watch BBC News.

For several seconds I stared vacantly at the screen, unable to comprehend the shocking nature of the images I was seeing. There was a man sobbing incoherently to a reporter and emergency services vehicles illuminating huddles of grim-faced onlookers ...

Bottled Goods is a simple tale of life in the Socialist Republic of Romania during the late 1960s and ‘70s. Or is it? What starts out as the story of schoolgirl Alina growing up in Bucharest with her somewhat eccentric family morphs perplexingly into full-blown magical realism three-quarters of the way through, after which, elements become unexpectedly surreal.
Alina is a twentysomething school teacher when she and her husband Liviu find themselves of significant interest...

American writer, Karen Smith Kenyon, first travelled to the small hilltop village of Haworth in 1992. Situated in the county of West Yorkshire, on the very edge of the windswept Pennine Moors, this now popular tourist destination is best known for its association with the Brontë sisters: three gifted, nineteenth-century si...

I remember vividly that bleak period in the early 1980s when a spectrum of bizarre but fatal conditions started afflicting gay men. The tabloids were in their element, describing the mystery illnesses as a ‘Gay Plague’ while rallying their readers to demand all homosexuals be deported somewhere remote, away from ‘decent people’. As religious leaders proclai...

When I started reading Ghost Wall, the forthcoming novel from Sarah Moss about a group of people setting up camp close to Hadrian’s Wall as an exercise in experiential archaeology, I surmised from the demeanour of Silvie, its protagonist (and narrator), she was far younger than her actual age. I took her to be a precocious eleven, possibly twelve-year-old, onl...

We meet eleven-year-old Gael Foess and her younger brother Guthrie, the children of wealthy but aloof parents (Jarleth, an arrogant and controlling investment banker for Barclays, and Sive, a self-absorbed but gifted principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra) at the point when she is expelled from primary school for running a business flogging “virgin pills” to her classmates.

The story begins in 2002, at the tail-end of the first Celtic Tiger – a p...

Grab your bins. Lev has landed

Today Book Jotter becomes the fourth stop on Lev Parikian’s great Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? Blog Tour. I have been itching to share my thoughts on this engaging memoir since the author first contacted me several weeks ago with the offer of a place on his tour. Here, at last, is my review.
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“People are good, on the whole; bird people especially so. It’s such a simple thing, to share pleasure in a slice of nature, yet so enri...

Will Schwalbe thinks “fifty-plus is a good age for big questions,” and believes with a passion that many of the answers can be found in books. He was 54 when writing this literary self-help manual cum reading memoir, and the myriad answers he proffers to the eternal refrain: “Why is it that we read?” are engaging, humorous and frequently moving.
His idiosyncratic selection of literary works...