ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Latest editorial
Crime fiction round-up: July 15, 2019
MAT COWARD reviews American Spy, Whisper Network, A Shroud Of Leaves and A Secret Life
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
SET amid Thomas Sankara’s socialist revolution in Burkina Faso, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Dialogue Books, £14.99) is a most unusual espionage story.
Marie, its heroine, is a rarity — a black woman working in US intelligence in the 1980s. She’s desperate to undertake real work rather than the condescending scraps she’s thrown in the Ivy League world of the Feds and, as a child of the cold war, happy to do her bit against the spectre of communism.
Similar stories
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
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
Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise