War Games by Linda Polman

Article by Gwilym John Regular readers of VL may recall the first book I shared with the community. Written by the freelance Dutch journalist, Linda Polman, it followed the blue helmeted forces of the United Nations peacekeeping forces through the crises of the 1990s: the collapse of Haiti, the anarchic disaster in Somalia, reaching a [...]

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Publisher Interview: Faye Dayan from Roast Books

Roast Books burst on the scene in 2008 with a very different approach to publishing. Their A-Z of Possible Worlds (reviewed here by Lisa) consisted of a box in which individual stories were wrapped like tiny pampthlets – each to be read separately. A series of novellas – called Great Little Reads – are beautiful [...]

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Vulpes Revisited: Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam

Vulpes Libris Big Green Bookshop Book of the Month Earlier this year, Vulpes Libris became one of ten blogs to contribute to The Big Green Bookshop Bloggers Book of the Month. The Big Green Bookshop is an independent bookshop in Wood Green in London. Each month, we send through one review for a book that [...]

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Coming Up This Week

We have a mixed bouquet of topics this week on VL, not only some thought provoking reviews, but also an interview with a publisher and a tale of how the submission to a publisher of  a book about a 1950s television series had entirely unexpected results.  Plus, we are kicking off a new tradition of [...]

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Swapped by a Kiss by Luisa Plaja

  I wish I wasn’t myself anymore. I wish I was her. I wish I was Jo. When Rachel’s on/off boyfriend goes to a music festival in England, she jumps on a plane to surprise him. But when she gets there, she sees him kissing someone else – their friend Jo. Super-lovely, super-loved, all-round-perfect Jo. [...]

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Sand ~ by ~ Michael Welland – and a Giveaway!

A Journey Through Science and the Imagination. Of all the spectacular artefacts discovered in the tomb of  Tutankhamun in 1922, few are more eye-catching, and none more intriguing, than the pectoral – the  beautiful and elaborate pendant around the boy king’s neck.  The lilies, lotus flowers and cobras adorning it are picked out in carnelians, [...]

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Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce – something rotten in the state of Denmark?

To the girls who come to make it big in the ‘What the Butler Saw’ movie industry, Aberystwyth is the town of broken dreams. To Dean Morgan who teaches at the Faculty of Undertaking, it is just a place to get course materials. But both worlds collide when the Dean checks into the notorious bed [...]

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Two Lives by Vikram Seth

Two Lives is Vikram Seth’s memoir of his uncle Shanti (Shanti Uncle) and Shanti’s German-Jewish wife, Henny Caro, who the author always called Aunty Henny, is also an examination of the process of writing history and of the writing process itself. As writing is very central to Seth’s own identity, this book also carries the [...]

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The Lost Revolution by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar

Let’s Stick Together. Talking recently to an employee of the Irish Labour Party, I was informed that the Stickies who had entered the party during the reverse takeover by Democratic Left (explanation follows) had brought some welcome activist commitment to the organization: “they go out and knock on doors”. This made me think of the [...]

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Still Life by Melissa Milgrom

As a tiny tot, I would often visit the elderly couple who lived upstairs and play with their stuffed baby alligator. This wasn’t a Beanie Baby(those hadn’t been invented yet), but an actual young alligator which had been taxidermied and sold in Florida, where the couple vacationed. That experience has undoubtedly led to my mixed [...]

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