London Review Bookshop Podcast

Before she became a well-known novelist, Margaret Atwood was an award-winning poet. She has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years, from the self-published, hand-set Double Persephone in 1961 to its follow up The Circle Game which won the Governor General’s Award, to her latest, critically-acclaimed collection D

‘Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.’ Solvej Balle’s septology On the Calculation of Volume (Faber), thirty years in the making, was published in Danish by the author’s ow

Gliff, the latest novel from Ali Smith, forms the first part of a duology; its title, the Scots word for a glimpse or shock, will be echoed but not replicated in next year’s Glyph. In a dystopian, Kafkaesque fictional lanscape, Smith explores how we make meaning and are made by it, and what it would actually mean for t

Josh Cohen’s new book, All the Rage (Granta), explores anger, in all its permutations - social media arguments, political divides, road rage, passive aggression – in the words of Deborah Levy, ‘brilliantly investigating what it is when we are enraged’. What should we make of our anger; to what use can we put it?  Cohen

In The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg – author of the HWA Crown Award-shortlisted Woman’s Lore - looks behind the tinsel and the turkey to explore the darker traditions of the Christmas season. At wassails, hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by ghastly, grinning horses, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors,

Eileen Myles reads from their first collection of poetry since 2018’s Evolution. The poems in a “Working Life” evoke the joy and unease in the quotidian, moving ‘with call and response between perception and thought’, as Camille Roy writes in Brooklyn Rail magazine. Myles is in conversation with journalist and activist