Mika Ross-Southall

A chilling childhood

29 April 2023 9:00 am

Growing up in New England, in a town simmering with menace, Ruthie suffers the agonies of parental neglect

Adrift in Berlin: Sojourn, by Amit Chaudhuri, reviewed

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…

Beware the woke misogynist

24 April 2021 9:00 am

The #MeToo movement isn’t all it seems. More than three years after countless sexual abuse allegations shook the world, the…

An unsentimental Hungarian education: Abigail, by Magda Szabó, reviewed

7 February 2020 10:00 pm

Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the…

A sinister feeling hangs over Sarah Moss’s claustrophobic sixth novel

6 October 2018 9:00 am

Sarah Moss’s concise, claustrophobic sixth novel concerns the perils of family life. The narrator Silvie is a frustrated 17-year-old on…

Shades of the Mitfords: After the Party, by Cressida Connolly, reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned…

Happy Little Bluebirds, by Louise Levene, reviewed

16 June 2018 9:00 am

In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote…