Review by Mithila Dutta Roy of "Supporting Cast" by Kit de Waal

It’s been months since I cried over a book, and short stories rarely do that to me. But Kit de Waal’s Supporting Cast made me tear up a bit on a bright Saturday afternoon. 

As the whole world is running around flaunting the idea of being the "main character" with the Pinterest-style life, glorious cafes and extravagant nightlife, there are still many who feel like the supporting cast in others’ stories. And Kit de Waal has brought their stories to life with such precision. Their losses of all kinds - time, age, love, lovers, children, sanity, legs - that form their imperfect lives are staged in a voice that is empathetic and truthful. That’s the mastery these stories needed and got.

Before starting the short story collection I didn’t know that these were the characters in the background of her earlier works. But it didn’t matter as I went from one story to another and found each character becoming a whole, with their nuances, flaws and introspection. Each story stood out as a complete piece, which was fascinating. 

It’s a book that talks about a woman who, on her divorce day, remembers her husband rescuing a boy during their honeymoon; a mother who says goodbye to her newly-wed son and starts thinking about how the bride never thanked the mother who loved him first - and then, in turn, realises that she never thanked her adopted son’s mother. It’s a book about the blind man who passes you by in a crowded street, and what he is still grateful for. It’s a story of an already grieving woman trying to form stories to make her dying father less uncomfortable.

These stories delve into deep human emotions and inner conflicts, while keeping the plot poignant. Some of the stories break what some would call the rules or conventions of short fiction, but even in breaking them there seems to be a purpose, and that is an achievement. Overall, Kit de Waal has done a wonderful job in giving the supporting cast the highlighted stories they deserve. She has given them the closure they might not have received in previous books, where they were only a part of the conversation but not the whole conversation.

Now, which one of these stories made me tear up, or was it my unbalanced hormones? You’ll have to read this book yourself to figure it out, because I’m also just another supporting cast in your story talking about a book I enjoyed.

About the reviewer
Mithila Dutta Roy is a reader and writer with a keen interest in literary fiction and stories that explore human experience. She is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester and is currently working on her first novel. She is passionate about storytelling and hopes to contribute her own voice to contemporary literature.

Review by Laura Besley of "Paper Sisters" by Rachel Canwell

"What you saw was a woman, bent out of shape. Pushed beyond her breaking point. Turns out we’ve all got them." Rachel Canwell’s debut novel, Paper Sisters, depicts the lives of three family members: sisters Eleanor and Lily as well as their sister-in-law, Clara. Each of these young women is isolated – by grief, by circumstances, and by the unforgiving marsh and relentless river of the fen. And looming over it all is the unstoppable march towards World War I. 

After the prologue, which depicts one of the many great sorrows that hangs over this family, Paper Sisters opens on May Day, 1914. The tension between the two sisters – Eleanor who wants change, who wishes to go out, and Lily who wants everything and everyone to stay the same – is immediately apparent: "Irritation, ancient and unchecked, rises. Eleanor’s gaze drifts back to the window, out to the never-ending sky; vast, buttressing every leaf, reed, and clump of grass. Today its cornflower blue is marked by just a wisp of early summer cloud. As always, the sky dominates, claiming her eye and this place as its very own."

Place plays a large part in the novel. The two houses in which much of the story unfolds – one overshadowed by an abandoned hospital, the other by an unstable husband – feel cramped and claustrophobic; the landscape feels vast and wild and unpredictable. It is against these places, and against this time in history, that each of the three women grapple with the difficulties of their lives. 

Their actions are, in turn, admirable and shameful – all three are both hero and villain. On their own paths, yet unable to avoid the intersections, Eleanor, Lily and Clara cannot live with each other, but nor can they live independently. As more and more tragedy is heaped upon them, the story is propelled forward to its unexpected yet inevitable conclusion. 

Rachel Canwell is the author of a flash fiction collection, Oh I Do Like to Be (2022), and a novella-in-flash, Magpie Moon (2022). Paper Sisters – compelling and immersive; full of horror, yet full of hope – is her first full-length novel. 

About the reviewer

Laura Besley enjoys exploring big stories in small spaces and has published four collections of flash/micro, most recently: Sum of her PARTS (V. Press, 2025). She is currently a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester, an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and JMWW, and runs The NIFTY Book Club.

Review by Kimaya Tushar Patil of "The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black

"If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse": The Cruel Prince by Holly Black drags the readers into the twisted realm of Faerie, where smiles equal danger and beauty hides ruthlessness. And for a mortal, most days, survival means walking a knife's edge between wit and wavering morals. The narrative follows Jude Duarte, a mortal girl who was abducted along with her twin and half-sister, and whisked to the realm of Faerie after the brutal massacre of her biological parents by the Grand General of Elfhame. 

Growing up in the realm of Faerie, Jude learned early on to tread with caution even when being protected by the General's reputation. The only way to rise above her oppressors was to gain power over them. 

Black's narrative revolves around Jude's metamorphosis from a victim to a cunning strategist fuelled by political ambition. She twists the familiar, captivating beauty of Faerie with moral ambiguity, exposing the cruelty hiding beneath. Her prose is succinct and adds deeper layers of emotions to the atmosphere of the world. And while the political intrigue is multifaceted, the pacing sometimes stutters as scenes of intimidation and violence recur. Her worldbuilding is extensive, but it sometimes focuses solely on ambiguous emotion, rather than information for the reader.

The subtle romantic tension between Prince Cardan and Jude lays a foundation for the character arc to progress emotionally in the later books. Unlike most Young Adult leads, Jude's desire for power, along with her readiness to deceive, exploit, and accept cruelty for it, adds a twist to the traditional "moral heroine."   

The Cruel Prince excels in its incisive rendering of its characters and political intricacy. Black presents us with a dark and cunning fantasy that instead of appealing to sentiments, appeals to readers who crave a morally multifaceted heroine and worlds where survival hangs between the right choice or the necessary choice.  

About the reviewer
Kimaya Tushar Patil is a graduate of the University of Leicester’s MA in Creative Writing programme. A lifelong reader, writer and poet, she is particularly interested in fiction, narrative voice, and literary craft. She enjoys engaging critically with books that leave a lasting impression. You can read more about Kimaya's work on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "All the Days I Did Not Live" by Anna Vaught

Firstly, I do judge a book by its cover, and Will Dady’s design is beautiful and instantly drew me in. I wanted to see what was inside, and I was not disappointed. From the very start, the language is beguiling and sensual. Descriptions are crystal clear and haunting.

Catherine loses her husband and doesn’t show much grief, which annoys her family - particularly her daughter Martha, who, perhaps, sees herself in her mother and now resents her for it. 

Gabriel was a functional man, Catherine a sensual woman, and she had had that slowly squeezed out of her. Her father wanted her to be "pliable" and tried to persuade her husband to make her so. They didn’t realise that she had overheard this conversation, and it had festered in her mind. She already despised her father, who was a cruel man who had crushed her mother. His behaviour is alluded to, but never fully described, so we have to make our own assumptions.

Catherine's mental health is also an issue. She is at odds again with her family, who want to protect her, who want her to act in a "normal" way, to grieve "correctly." The tensions are palpable. She eschews mourning and goes out to shows, buys "unsuitable" makeup and two phones as an act of rebellion, and also wonders whether she stole something from a shop at the same time.

This is where the story turns. We had already met Alec, another widower who lost his wife slowly to illness, and is still deeply in love with her memory. He rings the phone, his wife’s old number and finds that Catherine has purchased it. They flirt; they meet and have a brief, tumultuous sexual affair in Paris. Alec is everything that Gabriel wasn’t, and Catherine delights in his bed. Paris was the scene of her honeymoon with Alec, a clever trope echoing how cold Gabriel was compared to Alec.

Alec still misses his wife. What Catherine does next is exciting. Too much information will spoil this for you, but I found it an intoxicating story. Some words jump out and shock you, but it is all the better for the metamorphosis of Catherine. 

Will her children understand? Her mother does. What will she do with her newfound freedom? Will her hopes now come true, after the constraints of her married life? It is all in the title, and we have to interpret it as we wish. This is the beauty of the tale. It is eloquent, passionate, sensuous, and wonderfully descriptive, open to so many different interpretations. It charts a dysfunctional series of relationships, some irreversibly broken over time, but others restored. 

Do read this.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about All the Days I Did Not Live by Anna Vaught on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "Boater: A Life on England's Waterways" by Jo Bell

I’ve been aware of, and an admirer of, Jo Bell’s poetry for several years, so was excited to learn about this memoir she has written, all about her life living on a boat and travelling around England’s canal system. Published by Harper North, Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways is a cracking good read, and you’ll learn something about canal history too!

Living close to a canal myself, I’ve always been slightly envious of the lifestyle of the boat-dwellers as I’ve taken a walk down the towpath on a crisp winter morning or on a sunny afternoon, and as they sit with their cups of tea and biscuits, navigating through the canal systems of Greater Manchester. For a mere house-dweller like me, the lifestyle seems to offer freedom, albeit with plenty of hard work, a sense of fulfilment in spending time opening and closing locks, getting the fresh water in, emptying the wastewater out, filling up with fuel and wood for the fire. And this is pretty much the life Bell explores in her book.

However, what makes this book much more interesting than your run-of-the-mill memoir about living on a boat is the historical element she weaves through it. I now know about Telford, Rolt and Brindley, I know how locks are supposed to work, I know about the Nicholson maps. But this information doesn’t come across in a preachy "I’m teaching you something you should know about" way – although of course we should all know about it, because, as Bell highlights, it is such a central part of our recent history. No, Bell writes about the historical elements because of the way they link into her life, link into the choices she makes not just in where to go next, but why and how, and we learn that the decisions made by these genius innovators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continue to shape her life. 

The book is written in three parts, all with short sections, and there are small moments of repetition, which perhaps might have been edited out, but these are easily forgiven with the sheer joy and energy in the book. As a bank-dweller, sometime gongoozler and slightly envious reader, I know now never to ask a boat-dweller if it is cold in the winter, but I’ve also learned not just about Jo’s life but about the industrial revolutionary history of our waterways.

This is a joyous book, and I would say if you can hold back the envy (maybe that is just me!) get yourself a copy and settle in for a cosy read. 

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023. 

You can read more about Boater by Jo Bell on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Veer, Oscillate, Rest" by Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter has a way of simplifying complex and serious narratives into easily digestible, almost kindly delivered rants in this collection. Her journey into the sentence, which starts "If one can take a sentence for a walk," is where I really begin to smile - about twenty pages in, just after the main title poem. I found myself reading each poem twice or more. The expression of her words openly mirrors the endless flow of life, where there is no end and no beginning to all that is and how we move through it.

This is political poetry, yet not polemic. At the start, she delivers a cool, collected punch to the systems that govern us and observes how we respond. From stereotypical "trailer trash," she traces the literal patterns and content of life in America. With references to presidents, corporations and culture, "My America" touches on the gamut of everything American, poetically listing in a way that is at once complete and seemingly disappointed with the lot.

"Project Cannikin" goes a step further with its damning, cut-to-the-chase lines, such as "Up goes the island - twenty-five feet! Down come a thousand dead sea otters," and "(crushed skulls) (ruptured lungs) (snapped spines) / Nine-year-old Emily said, 'It was kind of like a train ride.'" This references the impacts of nuclear testing in Alaska in 1971. The casual but cuttingly direct descriptions make no bones about the disdain for such activity, simply shining a light on the same flippant casualness with which they are perceived by the desensitised child, Emily.

"Fat" and "Tornado" both have an air of critiquing the normalised, expected modes of behaviour and happenings in a damaging culture which is the result of its own addictions and consequences. By the fifth poem, "Night England by Train," the focus moves to the UK and its bleakness. The author manages to touch very briefly on significant points that sum up a place in a flash. The colour orange and a tail mentioned paint a picture of fox hunting and countryside, at least to me. The commentary triggers our own perceptions and expresses a sort of composed anger, calmly and matter-of-factly, analysing the troubles of the world in a pinpointed way. In "The Reckoning," for example, the demise of the NHS, racism, fear, lack, survival, conflict, accountability and prejudice are all addressed succinctly - almost list-like, again complete and thorough in its critique of the absolute mess that politicians are creating.

This collection made me wonder and made me laugh. Very human, social observations touch upon all the influences hitting our world, wherever we are on the planet - buzzwords normalised, behaviours that are not. There are nods to other poets, like "The Rival" after Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name, suggesting impressions of youth and possibly mild envy, and "One for London" for W.S. Graham, referring to wine and jazz and drunken moments in "milk-grey London."

Etter aptly denotes the need for expression regarding how much of the weight of the world we have to hold, in the line: "Language, I'm going to need you shortly, if I'm going to sustain the moment's teeming." This acutely describes how much we sustain without question. Narcissism, bipolar disorder, sibling rivalry, complexities and family in an overheard conversation: "Overheard in Chicago" depicts the tone of a generation of diversity and the mental health consequences of living through certain times.

These are my perceptions of what at first seems simple and then reveals a world in quiet nutshells - or eggshells, which would be more fitting for the fragility and strength that hold us all together. There is a lot in these pages. And the title Veer, Oscillate, Rest aptly relates to the way in which the author navigates the content. Reading the pamphlet left me feeling content with the chaos and transitory nature of everything in the world and how we all meander through it. This is essential contemporary poetry. Read it slowly. Read it twice.

About the reviewer
Lisa Natasha Wetton (aka Lisa Life) is a regular contributor to the English pages of L’eco de Sitges, Barcelona. She is a Creative Artist, Coach & Hypnotherapist. She is collaborating on new writing projects with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she will be refining a draft of her first completed book, It’s all Made up – A Guide to Spirituality from a Working-Class Girl. With a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and based in Barcelona for the past six years, she is happy to be delving into the world of words. See: www.newlisalife.net and www.equilibrium-events.com.