Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "The Language of Now" by Anne Caldwell

Anne Caldwell’s The Language of Now is a collection of prose poems that moves quietly but insistently through memory, landscape and the fragile textures of everyday life. Rooted in a northern sense of place, the book also engages with illness, ecological unease and the emotional afterlife of recent years.

Caldwell has become one of the most assured contemporary practitioners of the prose poem, and this form suits her especially well. These pieces are compact but spacious, lyrical without becoming vague. They unfold in paragraphs that seem at first conversational, then deepen into something more meditative. Her work returns repeatedly to bogs, backstreets, moorland, weather and overlooked urban edges, yet these are never simply settings. They are charged spaces where memory, vulnerability and the more-than-human world meet.

Caldwell’s restraint is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. She lets emotion gather around an image until it becomes quietly affecting. In "Wasp’s Nest," the speaker listens for "the ragged edges of our lives," a phrase that captures much of the collection’s mood: vulnerability, endurance and the sense that contemporary life often feels slightly frayed. In "Widdop Gate, High Summer," the moorland is described as "egg-shell delicate," and later as "a map of the whole world in miniature." These small phrases open outward with surprising force.

Some of the most moving poems connect strongly with questions of class, culture and language. "Boundary Lane, 1974" in particular stirs that recognition. Its backward glance towards a childhood street, and towards the social world carried in place and speech, suggests how deeply early surroundings shape us. Caldwell’s attention to ordinary language and remembered environments prompts a nostalgic return to childhood: to voices, habits and local textures that once seemed fixed. What these poems understand so well is that growing into the present often means letting go of much that was once familiar in order to make way for the new. 

The title poem suggests another dimension of the collection’s thinking. Caldwell writes that the language of the present moment "now drifts away like a driftwood smile … or a Spring moon waxing and waning." These images capture the book’s underlying concern with impermanence: the sense that language, memory and even identity shift continually with time.

Elsewhere the emotional register deepens into something more intimate. In "Lost Daughter," the line "I wrote a letter: Dearest Daughter, how I longed for you. To hold your butter-coloured toes in my hands" carries a tenderness that is both personal and universal. The image is simple, yet it holds an entire emotional landscape within it. 

What emerges from The Language of Now is a poetics of attention. These prose poems do not seek dramatic revelation. Instead they offer something quieter and more enduring: a way of seeing the ordinary world with renewed sensitivity. In a literary culture that often rewards urgency and noise, Caldwell’s work reminds us of the value of patience, listening and careful noticing. This is a subtle, moving collection that stays with the reader long after the final page, and invites return, offering a brief but beautifully crafted space for quiet reflection.

About the reviewer
Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, post-doctoral researcher and lecturer. His interests include speculative fiction, queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form. He recently published his debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle (2022), and his work as commissioning editor resulted in two titles winning prestigious regional awards. His first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, is due to be published by The History Press (June 2026).

You can read more about The Language of Now by Anne Caldwell on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Iain Minney of "The Dark Fields" by Alan Glynn

Adam Glynn’s 2001 debut is probably best described as the fabled "positive drug story," albeit a cautionary tale about drug use. Strong themes of addiction, excess and greed run through it like a stick of rock.  

More-traditional drug users fall somewhere in-between hallucinating hippies, giggling stoners or hyperactive, gurning ravers, with the perception being uniformly negative. The "positive" drug in this novel, "MDT-48," allows the user to remain uncluttered, learning and performing practical tasks with a radically, evidence-based improvement, unlike other drugs, which merely mess with the user’s perception of themselves. In other words, MDT is the ultimate drug fantasy: it actually DOES make you smart and interesting.

Eddie Spinola is a something of an average guy; a little past his prime and stuck in a rut. The writing assignment he requested isn’t the labour of love and salvation he thought it’d be, and he has little else lined up on the horizon.  But a happenstance encounter with his ex-wife’s shady brother quickly changes his fortune. Literally.

Now (with a certain tiger-in-his-tank) Eddie’s blasting his way up the ladder a little too quickly and a little too impatiently for his own good, in order to quell his various appetites … and with his secret stockpile in place, but all manner of gaps, cracks, hallucinations and allegations becoming increasingly obvious and hard to ignore, the only question seems to be how much higher can Eddie go?

A neat and original premise is wonderfully executed (especially for a debut) and metered out with appropriate caution and respect to the subject of drug use, rather than the fantastical and pithy romanticism that could have been applied to a substance that, thankfully, doesn’t exist. Although MDT could essentially be considered an aid to concentration (some sort of hyper-concentrated Ritalin, for example), it allows the story to expand on "Addiction to ambition" as another interesting sub-reference to the Reaganomics era, to which so much is unfortunately owed.  

The writing style is pleasant too, with the quasi-autobiographical first-person narrative providing a rewarding full-circle twist ending, that underlines what must have been a genuinely thorough and painstaking research process, allowing the author any number of hidden in-jokes. The tycoon character "Van-Loon" seems suspiciously similar to a figurehead brand like Trump, the so-called "Psychopharmacological" writer probably references Tim Leary, and even the title is taken from a line in The Great Gatsby.  There’s even a theme on lost (and rediscovered) love, and a pining for lost youth, signified in Eddie's love of drugs that he used to enjoy back with his ex-wife.

About the reviewer
Iain Minney (B.A. in Journalism & Creative Writing): tall, "mature," sober, comedian(ish). He has dabbled in stand-up comedy - which he has been writing since he was teenager - as well as being involved with comedy sketches, local filmmaking groups and working on local radio for a number of years both as "Head of News" and having his own weekly 3-hour show. He has been interested in writing for some time and even tried recording a number of audiobooks of short stories he's written together with satirical rants based on the standup he never quite "stood up" with. He loves old punk and 80s rock music, all manner of movies, and Bill Hicks and George Carlin SAVED HIS LIFE. But that's a whole other conversation.

Review by Lisa Williams of "Gentle November" by Alan Edward Roberts

"He was a magician but not a very good one": this is a book seemingly at first about an affair. The couple have just eloped, but I wouldn’t file this under "romance." They masquerade uncomfortably as father and daughter. There seems to be very little excitement and not much joy.

The story, we discover, is about a woman on a collision course, her life a "runaway train of sad events" heading towards a waiting desert. Namibia, specifically the Skeleton Coast, beckons from a childhood map, a "turbulent flight" away on a "long-ago upstairs landing."

This is somewhere she’s dreamed about, but again she doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. Things happen around her: life is out of her control.

We walk along a parched landscape of haunted trees and wrecked boats, the backdrop to a beautifully painful tale. This small volume is an intriguing story, one that pulls you in and demands to be read in one sitting. Gentle November is peppered with disturbing scenes and images and is skilfully haunting. We never find out the woman's name. This leaves a superb sense of unease, makes you feel like perhaps you weren’t paying her enough attention, and the story consequently lingers beautifully on, long after you’ve put the book down.

About the reviewer
Lisa Williams has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes word-limited flash fiction, mostly drabbles - stories of exactly one hundred words. You can find her online @noodleBubble. 

Review by Rachael Clyne of "Lamping Wild Rabbits" by Simon Maddrell

Simon Maddrell is such an accomplished poet with an assured voice, it’s hard to believe this is his debut collection. He writes about growing up as a gay man on the Isle of Man, drawing from its natural landscape for his themes: "even a stone has a soft spot / a worn through hole after years / of attrition, a heart whose emptiness / is its strength." He refers also to the hag stones in Derek Jarman’s famous Dungeness garden; both Jarman and his garden provide a motif for Maddrell’s exploration of his own journey through the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic and the added shame of being diagnosed HIV positive. Maddrell uses the analogy of wild rabbits as his central theme, successfully exploring the queer body in nature: whether feral, wild, hunted or ravaged by myxomatosis, it is easy to draw parallels. 

Maddrell plays skilfully with form, offering cleave poems and a redacted form using [      ] with only a scatter of words. He does not shrink from subverting an iconic biblical passage in his rewrite of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In "1 Queerinthians 13," he takes the verses and applies them to queer men, drawing a counterpoint between love and shame, thus completing the sentiment with its shadow: "three things remained: love, hope, shame, these three. / The greatest of these was shame. // Shame is a darkness with no darker shadow / it does not envy, does not puff up, is not proud."

The genre of "queer poetry" is about disruption of form and subversion of poetic expectations. Maddrell is a poet who does this again and again, without falling into the trap of flippancy. His voice springs from a history of shame, struggle and painful loss and he emerges courageously and unapologetically himself.

 

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014), concerns eco-issues. Her latest (Seren 2023) is You’ll Never Anyone Else, which explores identity, migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships. She is on Bluesky @rachaelclyne.bsky.social and on Substack here.    

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.