Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

I don’t live at home with my three younger siblings anymore. I have my own flat which is shoe-box-sized, but mine, and I can read there whenever I like. I’ve always been a reader, ever since my mum sh

WHEN Kate had decided, at the age of fifty-five, to reduce her working hours and go part-time at her job, she had imagined filling her extra days off with all kinds of exciting adventures. Instead, sh

Eduardo Halfon Tarantula Translated by Daniel Hahn 192pp. Hamish Hamilton. Paperback, £10.99. When I was a teenager growing up in apartheid South Africa, in the midst of a low-grade civil war, white s

In 1990, the sculptor Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of the sitting room of a vacant London house in plaster of Paris to create “Ghost”, a work which the critic Jonathan Jones described as “the so

The Disappearing Act concerns a novelist in her fifties who lives in an unnamed European country and is on her way to a literary festival in an unnamed location. Her name is given only as “M”. We vagu