Review by Kevan Manwaring of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

Julian Stannard’s slim novel (novella, really) is an excoriating satire of Higher Education. It is also a near-future dystopia, but one told with jaunty gallows humour – try to imagine George Orwell meets PG Wodehouse, if you can, and you’ll be near the mark. Set in an overly-surveilled, debilitatingly techno-demented semi-police state of 2035 (which feels not a stone’s throw from the present day) in the south of England, the titular University of Bliss is a venerable Arts-based HE institution with an ecclesiastical heritage. It charts the ridiculous (mostly) benign dictatorship of the vacuous VC and toadyish Senior Leadership Team: the anodyne initiatives and vacuous doublespeak, dumbing down and bending over for the sacred cow of the "student experience," and endless impositions upon the already overstretched academic staff, who seem to be least vital part of this extractivist factory-farm-food-chain.

It is good to see a book written with rage.

This is a venting of a spleen that many in academe could relate to: a rage against the iniquities of the broken HE sector, and the general inanity of modern life (emails are called "doomails," and the World Wide Web the "Wob"). It made me laugh out loud at times, and there were many great lines that deserved writing down (e.g. "Anodyne is the New Paradigm"; "Simple slogans illuminated the university: Be Good Enough, Reach for the Possible, Read Only When You Feel the Urge, The University Is All About You"; "Freedom of Speech is OK But Watch What You Say!").  

Perhaps this is indicative of Stannard as an accomplished poet – who seems better at turning a good phrase, than writing plot. The comedy here is the driving force, perhaps relentlessly so. There is a strafing of intertextuality and literary in-jokes. It is also very scatological, with a lot of defecating, masturbating, and sweaty saucy seaside-postcard-type shenanigans—a kind of Carry On Academia, mixed with the rough-and-ready humour of the Commedia dell Arte and Punch and Judy. Writing a satire is like making a balloon puppet with spiky gloves – the intention is hard-edged, but the result is often insubstantial. One can imagine this amusing the converted, but never striking the actual targets. It will most likely fall under their radar—a schoolboyish (if erudite and accomplished) in-joke, passed beneath the desk to fellow sufferers.  

The whole religious subplot about the Blessed Aubergine felt irrelevant. Religion is a rather broad target to hit, whereas the ridiculousness, shallowness, and hypocrisy of the HE sector in its current state feels like a more focused, and original target. The characters are lightly-sketched, larger-than-life cyphers for the "types" found in academe, from the cleaner to the Vice Chancellor. We focus most of all on poet and lecturer, Dr Harry Blink, although it seems clear we are not really meant to emotionally invest in any of the characters. There is a climax, when the absurdity reaches its zenith, which could be seen as cathartic, but it is better to just enjoy the one-liners rather than worry too much about "set up and pay off" and other contrivances of fiction.

Overall, it feels like a timely updating of the campus novel, and one that deserves to be read widely in academe – as a "deprogramming" from the modern hallucination that it is under, where it seems teaching is the last thing that "happens" and actual endeavour of education the least valued amid the miasma of bureaucracy and insultingly reductive initiatives focused on cash cow demographics, curricula driven by finance and marketing, "optics," "staff wellbeing," survey results and league tables. The University of Bliss feels like a much-needed enema to all of that.

About the reviewer
Dr Kevan Manwaring is the MA Creative Writing programme leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of Writing Ecofiction (Palgrave Macmillan), The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media (Routledge), Heavy Weather (The British Library), and others. His latest novel is Thunder Road. 

You can read more about The University of Bliss by Julian Stannard on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "White Road" by Harry Whitehead

 

Harry Whitehead’s White Road is an arresting work of eco-fiction that combines the taut urgency of a thriller with the moral weight of a contemporary fable. The novel interrogates not only the limits of human endurance but also the ethical boundaries of exploitation, survival and responsibility in an age of ecological crisis.

It opens in the Canadian Arctic, a landscape at once magnificent and merciless. Into this environment comes Carrie Essler, a Scottish rescue swimmer, whose skills and resilience are tested almost immediately. A mission goes wrong and leaves her stranded on the ice with two impossible companions: a half-dead stranger and a starving polar bear. With no clear way back to safety, every decision she makes could mean life or death. Beyond Carrie, figures such as Ross, the oil rig owner mired in guilt, and Amaruq, the Inuvialuit worker torn between tradition and modern demands, create a polyphonic exploration of conscience and consequence. These intersecting narratives refuse easy resolution, instead offering a layered meditation on human ambition and fragility. 

Whitehead handles a set of complex topics and themes with a deft touch. He avoids polemic, instead allowing the characters’ experiences to illuminate questions of responsibility and consequence. And the novel is at its strongest when it lingers in ambiguity, where no choice feels wholly right, and survival itself comes at a price. Stylistically, he balances precision with lyricism and the pacing is finely calibrated: moments of breathless intensity are counterbalanced by passages of quiet introspection, allowing the novel’s thematic concerns to resonate without sacrificing narrative momentum. While stranded on the ice, Carrie encounters Bastien, a ghostly presence that delivers a sardonic, mansplaining, yet knowledgeable running commentary on the surrounding environment and Arctic lore. This eerie, sometimes-gallows-humour voice offers both guidance and unsettling commentary as she navigates the brutal landscape. It is through this supernatural element that Whitehead effectively introduces an "Ecogothic" dimension to the narrative, blending environmental consciousness with spectral intervention, and elevates the final sections of the narrative to a whole new level. 

The Arctic itself is brought to life with almost mythic presence. Whitehead’s prose renders the ice, wind and sea as more than backdrop. They emerge as sentient forces, capable of awe and terror in equal measure. The natural world becomes a crucible, exposing the weaknesses and strengths of those who enter it. "Only a vague, ambient light outlined the whitecaps breaking all around her, jagged white lines that appeared behind, ahead, and, terrifyingly, above." Some of the most haunting imagery is of nature reeling from and submitting to the horrors of leaking oil that travels upwards and outwards from the site of the disaster, set on imprinting its dreadful tattoo on the Arctic landscape and unsuspecting wildlife. "She [Carrie] switched on her torch and shone it down. Rainbow glittered back at her … she knew crude." And elsewhere, a polar bear emerges from the icy waters, its fur coated in the same oil: "It swung round, trying to bite its own flanks. Round and round like a dog chasing its tail." 

As a piece of storytelling, White Road is compelling – driven, clear-eyed and cinematic in its set pieces. Yet it can also be highly reflective, encouraging the reader to pause and consider what lies beneath the action: the fragile beauty of the natural world, the limits of human endurance and the moral compromises that underpin modern life. This is a novel that entertains while it unsettles, gripping the reader even as it asks difficult questions. Whitehead has produced a timely and resonant work that stays with you, long after the Arctic ice has closed over its final page.

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer living in Cornwall. His interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic form. His debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press (2022) and fiction titles he has recently worked on as commissioning editor have won multiple regional readers’ and publishers’ awards.

Review by Nicole Yurcaba of "Wolf Bells" by Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas’s novel Wolf Bells publishes in September 2025 in the United States, and, honestly, with the current socio-political dysfunction rampaging across the US, it is a novel that could arrive at a more appropriate time. Why? With the signing of Trump’s "Big, Beautiful Bill" into law on 4 July 2025, caretakers across the United States will face increased work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP benefits. The bill also reduces accessibility to essential supports and significantly cuts home-and-community-based services. Thus, an important question arises: when the government cuts essential, life-affirming, and life-saving services and benefits to citizens, whose role is it to provide them? Essentially, Wolf Bells—with its portrayal of an intergenerational community led by a former punk singer—attempts to answer this question. However, the novel also dares to explore the consequences of what happens when a community’s good intentions go completely awry.

On a bluff above a river rises the House, a place where the elderly, the disabled, the abandoned, and the young live alongside one another and complete daily tasks and chores in order to receive free rent. Caz, a former punk singer, is the caretaker for the House’s inhabitants. The House teeters on financial ruin’s edge, and to worsen Caz’s predicaments, two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up, needing refuge. James is a special-needs child whose behaviour taxes everyone, but a mystery also looms as to why Nola chose to take James and venture towards the House. As each of the characters wrestles with their own strange, often heartbreaking circumstances—ranging from an elderly man whose daughter has seemingly abandoned him to a woman whose memories of the Holocaust haunt her daily—they must also band together to care for James in whatever ways they can. Meanwhile, the authorities are searching for Nola and James, and those in the House’s surrounding area who know Nola and James’s whereabouts threaten to wreck the House’s goals and innerworkings.

Wolf Bells is raw and gritty and real—a bit like a new, contemporary version of Lord of the Flies. Or, perhaps, it can also be compared to that single scene in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows in which each of the Collins family members are seated miserably around a gigantic table, throwing coarse verbal jabs at one another while Donovan’s "Season of the Witch" plays in the background. The House and its residents are isolated from the outer world’s laws, trappings, and expectations. The House and its residents abide by one set of rules, and, despite their seemingly disrespectful take on another, they do interact and secretly care about one another. Discreetly, Wolf Bells addresses the individual sacrifices, as well as the necessary theoretical, practical and serious changes in societal and cultural mindsets intergenerational living requires. As the housing crisis intensifies, and as medical and long-term care costs skyrocket not only in America, but globally, more and more families and individuals consciously choose intergenerational living. Wolf Bells addresses this issue, since each and every character must make individual sacrifices for the betterment of the House’s residents. Communal bathrooms and living spaces strip away the guise of private ownership and entitlement. Each resident recognizes that spaces like one known as The Fish Bowl are meant for communal interaction, and such spaces eradicate the notion of private ownership. Thus, each character develops a deeper sense of responsibility for maintaining and cleaning these shared spaces. 

Of course, one cannot read Wolf Bells without recognizing the disruption Nola and James’s presence causes for the House’s occupants. Wolf Bells portrays Nola as a sensible, precocious youngster who is wise beyond her years because of the neglect she has endured and navigated. She feels a responsibility to and duty for James and knows and perceives his needs better than most adults. However, no matter how much the House’s adults attempt to band together to care for—and even simply tolerate—the children’s presence, lapses in care develop. At first, it is humorous that James toddles around, eating the leaves of one of the plants in the House. Closer to the novel’s end, one of the characters recognizes that James should not be eating the leaves and that Caz does not even know whether or not the plants are edible or poisonous. In this scene, it becomes evident that the House is not truly intergenerational, since the needs of a toddler have never been considered. Also, James’s special needs pose an even larger challenge for the residents of the House, drawing even more into question the House’s inclusivity. James’s needs should be woven into the daily life of the House’s residents, since his needs are a clear reminder of the residents’ interdependence one another.

For one character, the mysterious Marika, James's personality and his behaviour remind Marika of her brother, Theo, whom German soldiers killed because he was disabled. Of all of Wolf Bells’ characters, Marika displays the most empathy for and connection with James. Nevertheless, Marika possesses an otherness entirely her own, one that also sets her apart from the other characters in Wolf Bells. She is Greek, and she is Jewish, and at one point she reflects: "'And then when I came to this country, I learned that Greek in America, meant 'alien' and 'unintelligible.' To be Greek and Jewish was much worse. Refugees of the war America won were not welcome in America because we were spies and Communists, we would steal jobs from citizens, we would spread contagion.'" Therefore, while James becomes the novel’s great educator, so to speak, he and Marika serve as strange, intergenerational mirrors of one another bound together by their otherness and united by a place that fails to understand them.

 Part of Wolf Bells’ allure lies in that it is implicitly political and socially aware without being polemical and trite. Wolf Bells is as radical as the society-shifting housing practices it explores—one completely unflinching in its boldness and bravery.

About the reviewer

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, Chytomo, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press. 

Review by Lisa Williams of "The Names" by Florence Knapp

"Cora never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like slamming down a sports bag."

Billed as "the story of three names, three versions of a life," this is a heart-tugging read but written in utterly enchanting prose.

In 1987, the UK was battered by a great storm. The book begins that night: as husband, Gordon, reminds his wife to register their son’s name the next day. And so, with the simple act of a baby being named the story starts and the damage from the storm is revealed. There are three separate stories told in the book. It’s the same family but the child gets a different name and life in each of the tales.

After a couple of chapters for each of the three names the plot jumps forward seven years. This gives quite a pleasing switch in your head between the different stories - and often a lurching dread when you remember how we left the action at the end of the last segment. 

The Names is a debut novel by Florence Knapp and already I can’t wait to read her next one.

About the reviewer
Lisa Williams is a creative soul from Leicester. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Leicester University. She writes mostly short fiction and really likes the challenge of a word limit – usually one hundred words. She publishes weekly on Substack here.

Review by Pam Thompson of "Passion" by David Morley

 

This dazzling collection begins with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke: "The work of the eyes is done. / Go now and do the heart-work on / the images imprisoned within you." There is plentiful evidence of "heart-work" in these poems. Morley, an ecologist and naturalist by background, combines the scientist’s observational precision with the poet’s imagination. The opening poem, "The Mist Net Releases Her Birds," is a ghazal, an Arabic form originally, its subject traditionally love and loss. It is written in couplets, each with a repeated last word as a refrain. "The pandemic makes prisoners of us" gives us the context. The poem ranges across the globe in a quest for togetherness and is underpinned with metaphors of flight and responses from the person being addressed, one of which is central to the collection, "We resist through poetry … poems are a kind of politics as well as religion."

The "wings of the ghazal" prepare us for numerous birds. A hummingbird vibrates on the page, "she havers / in the time warp of her / wingbeats" ("Rosy-Topaz Hummingbird"). There is a similar relish of the sounds of words in "Puffins on Bardsey":

          all frizz and fluff-crowns
                      rug-headed kerns
                                    clemmed, clumping
                                                up a skerry of sky

I liked the fact that Morley features scientific experiments and discoveries by women. "Swans" is dedicated to Caroline Herschel and her indexing of Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, 1798, with its gorgeous description of the comet named after her: "it’s swan’s neck of snow // dipping into the dark water of space." Anna Atkins uses sunlight to take photographs of seaweeds, "light-burned pictures in water" ("The First Book Printed by the Sun").

Morley’s use of the Romani language reflects his dual English/Romany heritage as it did in this book’s predecessor, Fury (2020). There are glossaries, though Morley has said elsewhere that he would ideally like the reader to derive meaning from the shape and sound of the Romani words alone. Using the language is a form of resistance against oppression. In "Storytelling," the poet gives a paper on the Romany language at an academic conference, "I spoke of its leopard-leap of dialects … // How the words galloped untethered …" Passion indeed, though It is greeted "cold applause" and a young lecturer asking about the point of all this "trash." For the poet, the point is to go on telling stories of the prejudices and privations faced by the Romany culture. Different voices include that of a caravan (or vardo): "I am a caravan. The eye of my door open to the vryámya (weather). / The Travellers douse me with benzína (petrol). I am unclean" ("Mermeyi Pesha").

There are poems about family, about Morley’s former work as a scientist. Emily Brontë, in a poem of the same name, contains her rage at winter’s advice to reject the first show of spring and "Make life bare." Yeats is summoned as a presiding spirit of intention in a poem towards the end of the book which echoes the opening ghazal’s wings and nets:

         I wake in my tent to the thrum of linnets
         on a morning of insect wings and glimmer,

         the mist melting over a mirror of water,
         and go. I go with my quiver of mist nets.
         

         ("Mist Nets on the Lake Isle of Innisfree").

"Growing primroses is also a process / of not growing them, a path of unlearning …" ("I Found Poems in the Fields"). I enjoyed travelling, listening and observing with David Morley in this absorbing and thought-provoking collection.

About the reviewer

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press), was published in March 2025.

You can read more about Passion by David Morley on Creative Writing at Leicester here.