Ange Mlinko

Emma Cline​ is an entertainer. Her first book, The Girls (2016), was a sensational reimagining of the Manson Family from the point of view of Evie, a 14-year-old who becomes entangled with the group. She’s not mesmerised by the guru figure, Russell, so much as by his harem – the long-haired, slightly scuzzy, dumpster-diving, shoplifting, insouciant ‘girls’. It is...

In her Clarendon Lectures​ , given at Oxford in 2023 and recently published as Poetry’s Nature (Oxford, £25.99), Susan Stewart recapitulates themes that have preoccupied her for half a century. ‘The Bird in Glee: On the Non-semantic’ returns to ideas she explored in her first study on poetics, Nonsense (1979). ‘The Seasons: Paradigm of Lyric Time’...

One can go​ long stretches without reading a contemporary novel in which children are vividly present, but parents – old, decrepit, dying or recently deceased – have seemed inescapable of late. Gwendoline Riley’s recent novels are a case in point. In First Love (2017) the narrator, Neve, contends with her galling, gallivanting mother while coming to the realisation that...

The Danish writer​ Olga Ravn has recently published two short novels, one set in the future and one in the past. Both concern insular societies whose members turn on one another with fatal consequences. The Employees takes place on the Six-Thousand Ship, floating through interstellar space with a crew of humans and humanoids working together on an unclarified mission for an unspecified but...