STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Crime fiction
Reviews of Good Neighbours by Sarah Langan, The Basel Killings by Hansjorg Schneider, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix and The Crooked Shore by Martin Edwards
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
SUBURBS in US fiction are often sinister places, but few more so than that at the centre of Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbours (Titan, £8.99).
Maple Street is an aspirational satellite of Long Island, and the Wilde family don’t fit in there and know it. Their accents strike their new neighbours as plebeian, their habits unsettling and their children undisciplined.
But that might not be enough on its own to cause a season of spiralling mayhem if it wasn’t for the sinkhole that opens up in the neighbourhood one dry summer.
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