Review by Laura Besley of "Jokes for the Gunmen" by Mazen Maarouf

Jokes for the Gunmen is a short story collection by award-winning Palestinian-Icelandic writer, poet, translator and journalist, Mazen Maarouf. It was translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. 

All the stories in the collection explore jokes and joking as either a means of exchange or a coping mechanism for the atrocities of living in a country at war. In the eponymous opening story, the father figure must make up jokes for the gunmen in order to avoid their wrath. ‘Of course, in front of a bunch of gunmen you have to be a good storyteller in order to win your freedom. Your story has to be convincing, enjoyable and very short, and it has to make people laugh.’ As a consequence, the withdrawn father and unruly son become closer as they both focus on the task of thinking up a new joke every day. 

In the story ‘Jokes’ there is another young boy trying to make up jokes. ‘I don’t have ready-made jokes in my head and I don’t remember any details of the few jokes I’ve heard. So I’m trying to sketch out the scenario for a joke in my head.’ On the flipside, the main character in ‘The Angel of Death’ doesn’t ‘have a sense of humour … and [doesn’t] understand why people smile.’ Throughout the story, everyone around him is trying to make him smile or laugh or giggle, but he is resolute. In fact, he gets angry when a man laughs at something he said ‘since [he] hadn’t intended to make a joke.’ In the story ‘Gramophone’ the father loses both his arms when a vacuum bomb strikes the building he was in, but jokes that it doesn’t matter; the gramophone is broken, so he doesn’t need his arms anyway. 

The sense of loss, both physical and emotional, runs throughout the collection. People lose limbs, eyes, loved ones; people are ‘pale, silent and thin’ and ‘hollowed out.’ Another theme rooted within the stories is violence, both inside and outside the home, and good use is made of the liminal line drawn between fantasy and reality.

In many ways this collection is a tough read; the depictions of war-torn families are heartbreaking. However, despite the losses these characters have to bear and somehow overcome, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Jokes for the Gunmen is a phenomenal collection.  

 

About the reviewer

Laura Besley is the author of 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She has been widely published in online journals, print journals and anthologies, including Best Small Fictions (2021). Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. She tweets @laurabesley

Review by Thilsana Gias of "Dust Child" by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

 

Dust Child is a breathtaking novel which powerfully weaves together the stories of people affected by the Vietnam War. 

The narrative itself is non-linear and told through multiple perspectives, allowing readers to simultaneously piece together the broken lives of the characters whilst untangling the complexity of what it means to have family in a time of conflict.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai particularly focuses on the struggles on Amerasian children, the women who bore them and the soldiers that left them behind. As readers, we find ourselves constantly challenging our own perceptions of duty, loyalty and honour as characters condemn each other's acts of survival whilst seeking forgiveness for their own wrongdoings.

Something significantly striking about this novel is the way that the writer allows characters to create a comforting, domestic bubble to protect themselves, only for it be abruptly punctured time and time again by trauma: "'Don't cook anything red!' he screamed as he washed up in the bathroom. She stared at the soup, made from ripe tomatoes she'd sautéed with finely chopped shrimps. Perhaps the colour resembled blood - blood that he'd seen or blood that he'd caused to spill."

Despite exploring such abject darkness, the novel is a multi-sensory delight for those who seek comfort in tropical settings. With references to sprawling markets, fresh rambutan, and expansive rice fields, you are rewarded with the richness of Vietnamese culture without crude romanticisation or the stench of death overpowering beautiful moments in the narrative. 

Something that is also distinctly Vietnamese about the narrative is the dialogue - the author often has entire sentences in Vietnamese or transliterated English showing how characters are able to break and build bonds with each other despite cultural and linguistic barriers.

The vibrancy and colour in this novel is also drawn from the respect that the characters have for storytelling. Stories become a source of power, betrayal, comfort and healing, even if untrue. What is most compelling about Dust Child, however, is the way that stories give a voice to the displaced, discriminated against and deployed. Clearly, the author's personal experiences with uniting American veterans and their children in Vietnam is what gives the novel a distinctly human touch.

About the reviewer
Thilsana Gias is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Leicester and a secondary school English Teacher based in Luton. She doesn't have much time for reading these days but is making a conscious effort to read something other than Macbeth, Jekyll and Hyde and An Inspector Calls.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Undisclosed" by Ruth O'Callaghan

This is a beautifully written series of poems, broken up into four parts. Each section invites the reader into a world of love, loss, the past and a search for freedom. We meet a variety of characters, ideas, images and reflections on life. There are myriad displays of different formats, each teasing us into O’Callaghan’s world - a world full of colour and provocations.

O'Callaghan's poetry seeks answers to questions that are at times unanswerable in a real sense, a rhetorical device that plays with the readers' emotions, taunting them to find a path to the world that O’Callaghan describes. Is it real or a fantasy? You have to decide for yourself. You are given all the tools you need in the form of delightfully constructed lines of verse: it is up to you, the reader, to decipher them and make of them what you will.

The poet is not trying to trick us, far from it. But she does challenge us. She challenges us to read between her lines and make a truth out of her words. This is a delightful process for the reader as we enter worlds full of colour and imagination, images that shock and suggest that her world, our world is not as straightforward as it seems.

Read this with an open mind and an open heart. The poems are alluring and engaging, encouraging us to read on and on until alas, we come to the end of the book. The only good thing about finishing it is that we can re-read and find something new in the poems as we confront them again. This is what makes the collection so accessible, so inspirational, we are always seeing something new, something different in each and every poem.

The poems are wonderful as every reading gives a new interpretation, a new way inside the poet's mind, into the poet's world and isn’t that everything that being a poet is?

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 68. 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 University. 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. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! 

Review by Laura Besley of "Chasing the Dragon" by Kathy Hoyle

Kathy Hoyle’s debut novella-in-flash, Chasing the Dragon, is an ambitious and compelling example of the form. The novella-in-flash is an emergent new genre operating largely outside mainstream publishing. It combines the concision of flash fiction standalone stories with the space in which to develop a novella-length narrative. In order to make the stories self-contained and unique, Hoyle has made good use of flash fiction techniques, such as stories written in the form of lists, letters and reports. This creates the variety and change of pace for the reader often found in novellas-in-flash while simultaneously ensuring each story adds to the overall arc.    

Despite its brevity – Hoyle’s novella-in-flash is sixty-five pages in total – Chasing the Dragon spans across generations, continents and cultures. It is told through multiple points of view and the main thread of the story is of Americans in wartime Vietnam, the difficulties they experience there and subsequently back home after their return to the United States. There is a single story written from the point of view of Bihn, a young Vietnamese boy. To create a deeper and richer understanding of these characters and their worlds, there are also stories set in an earlier time where we learn of the characters’ childhoods and childhood traumas.   

Hoyle is extremely adept at voice. The first story, which relays a Vietnamese proverb, opens with the sentence, ‘In Vietnamese legend, Lac Long Quan, the most noble king of all dragon-kind, lived near the water of the Dong Sea,’ and continues to be told in long lyrical sentences. The following story, from the perspective of Thomas Jefferson Scott or ‘[j]ust plain old JT,’ consists of much shorter sentences and a strong dialect: ‘Jacob don’t talk of it none. He don’t like guns none either. He says he’s a pacifist. That he don’t like hurtin no one nor nothin.’ The report and letter stories are both written in a more formal register befitting their forms and the list makes excellent use of repetition; each line starts with ‘He will’ or You will’ and a singular, heartbreaking, ‘They will.’ 

Through its seventeen stories – bookended with the Vietnamese proverb: Children of Dragons, Grandchildren of Gods – Chasing the Dragon sheds light on a largely overlooked consequence of war, as summed up by Willy telling his mama in the eponymous story: ‘Ain’t nobody won nothing.’ Kathy Hoyle’s novella-in-flash evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions, ranging from horror and outrage to compassion and awe. Each individual story is a fantastic rendering of flash fiction, but it is in its entirety that Chasing the Dragon really demonstrates Hoyle's range and ability for both the form as well as the depiction of characters and the worlds they inhabit. This is a truly stunning debut.  

About the reviewer

Laura Besley is the author of 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea.

You can read more about Chasing the Dragon by Kathy Hoyle on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Review by Gary Day of "Balloons and Stripey Trousers" by Rennie Parker

 

Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment would do well to keep a copy of Balloons and Stripey Trousers in their desk draw. It could very well save their sanity. Despite being an almost autobiographical cri de couer, this volume proclaims, to all who feel their souls withering in the arid air of office culture, ‘you are not alone.’

The theme of quiet desperation is apparent from the outset with the speaker proclaiming, in ‘a warning to the curious,’ that she ‘is growing smaller and smaller as your version of me grows larger.’ Another trait that is apparent in the opening poem is the frequent nod to other writers, in this case Wordsworth and Lawrence, both of whom were appalled, in their different ways, by the plight of the self in industrial society. Judging from these poems, its condition has only got worse. At work people are expected to submit to ‘the tickbox of their little existence’ and at home they break down with terrible consequences as hinted at in ‘brand new management despair expression.’  

Parker knows that art is not going to save us but it has its little victories. Several poems show supervisors and interview panels patronising, belittling and disparaging the speaker. Her gender and class are both factors in this treatment though neither are foregrounded. The tables are turned in the poem ‘the international collective of artists say no’ where retiring managers are told, with barely suppressed glee, that they do not meet the criteria to take up painting or poetry and that ‘their rejection’ along with their ‘P45 is in the post.’

The various literary and pictorial allusions give the poems a pleasing depth and resonance. The writing itself is witty, vivid and bright. A pleasure to read.   

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and the author of several critical works including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama. His debut poetry collection, The Glass Roof Falls as Rain, published by Holland Press, is due out in February.

You can read more about Balloons and Stripey Trousers by Rennie Parker on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Mike Gregory of "Our Friends in Berlin" and "London, Burning" by Anthony Quinn

Our Friends in Berlin (2018) is an intriguing, pacy, at times beautifully written espionage novel set amongst spies, fifth columnists, fellow travellers and innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystanders in London during World War 2. It covers, therefore, similar territory in many ways to Agatha Christie’s N or M? (1941) and Kate Atkinson's Transcription which, weirdly, came out the same year as Our Friends in Berlin. It's not quite as accomplished, clever or surprising as Atkinson's beguiling, bewitching spy saga, nor is it as delightfully daft as the Christie, but it’s very good.    

The descriptions of war-torn London borrow some of the weariness of early T. S. Eliot but as if crumpled into a plot by Eric Ambler. The frequent switches in third-person point of view keep things fresh. You find yourself, strangely, quite liking the undercover Gestapo agent, Hoste.  Plot reveals, when they come, are not always as surprising as Quinn perhaps intended, but they satisfy nonetheless. It's only in the last quarter where the writer sacrifices subtlety and wit to the dubious demands of action.  

 

London, Burning (2021) was even better, I thought. Set in the late 1970s, Quinn’s urban thriller trails the lives of a journalist, a theatre impresario, an academic and a young DC as they navigate a London crumbling under public service strikes, IRA bombing campaigns, the emergence of punk rock and police corruption. The young academic at one point is giving a tutorial on the role of coincidence in the fiction of Henry James; it's a clear signal of how Quinn wants the reader to treat the tragi-comic, often violent intersections of these disparate lives.  

As the story unfolds, we move from 1977 to the eve of Thatcher's 1979 election victory. Unlike other writers anchoring their stories to specific moments in socio-cultural history, Quinn never seems to put a foot wrong. (He certainly knows his Mott the Hoople, Clash, Kate Bush and disco). He even nails the precise smell of 1970s telephone boxes.  

About the reviewer
Mike Gregory is a 59 year-old who never quite recovered from a teenage addiction to the novels of Graham Greene. He spent a quarter of a century teaching English but has also been, at various times, a support worker, petrol station attendant, cinema projectionist, librarian, barkeep, civil servant and private tutor. Any job, basically, in which one might surreptitiously read.   

Review by Sue Mackrell of "Love Leans over the Table" by Rosie Jackson

True to its title, this collection of poems is about love. But not the Hallmark card kind, this is the love of mothers separated from their children, the pain of loss, the anguish of an anchorite: "Love is not the right word. Love is too cushiony / for a woman who sleeps on stone, kneels on stone, / prays with the steadfastness of granite." But there is tenderness, transcendence, "let’s call it light."

Rosie Jackson is kind to her young self, reading Nietzsche, "striding over black oak sleepers thinking of trains that carried kids from our pit village." "Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever," her father "urged" her in his copperplate writing. The same words, written by Charles Kingsley for his daughter, were inscribed in my own autograph book by a primary school teacher. They were very different times, and self-reflection is a theme which runs deep through this collection, the shot-gun wedding where her father "sobbed like a widow," a woman who "looked / like Jean Shrimpton." "In another generation, we’d be together." She has compassion for herself; despite everything, "It astonishes you so much of your life has worked."

In "The Night I Grew Old," she recalls how she knew, somehow, "a new life had arrived inside me, / its invisible heft so huge…" "By the time / dawn bleached that shabby room, the child I was / had already started to turn into that woman on the wall – The Lady of Shalott – her pre-Raphaelite hair trailing / into a boat which would carry her downstream, / her luscious mouth a terror of uprootedness."

The ekphrastic nature of many of these poems offers new perspectives on personal experience. In "Don’t Think these Doors will ever close, after Maternity by Dorothea Tanning" she writes "Loss of sleep has slipped you onto sand," but "You’re shocked by your heart / and its unspeakable love, love that stretches a heart beyond its limits." And then there is the visceral rawness of separation, the unanswerable question, "if / it would have been better not to give him life / so scratched and badly started. Better to have / sent him back before his cells rooted too deeply, / back to that pre-formed unsuffering place of stars."

Acutely sensitive to other stories of loss, in "Blue" Rosie Jackson describes her shock of recognition when she learns that "Little Green" is about Joni Mitchell’s child given up for adoption, "Now my loss sits in the next chair." She writes of Frigga, the Norse goddess mourning Balder, "what mother would not grieve for her lost child?" And she writes of mothers who lost daughters who became anchorites, dead to the world.

Her empathy reaches across time. She understands the ravages fourteen births must have taken on Margery Kempe’s mind and body, "And if she sobs before / Julian of Norwich it’s because she feels herself believed." She writes of violence - historical, "Is not the Bible full of women’s bruises?" - and contemporary, Nasrin Sotoudeh flogged for "A Piece of Cloth," "the Quran wedged beneath his armpit." 

There are poems of darkness, enclosure, "One Little Room, An Every Where," and the longing for light, for colour. Rosie Jackson writes of a physical and emotional response to the power of art, "The Hunger of Colour," where "paint spills beyond the frame / in sheer exuberance / so I want my life / to eat my death / like Harmony in Red by Matisse."   

She charts life changes through paintings; of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights she writes "I lived here once," "And here’s my mother, half horse, half hollow / egg," "But now I go in search of El Greco’s lengthened bodies straining - / like Christ in that other garden – between this world and the next." Her poems are peopled with poets, artists, spiritual leaders, anchorites, Muslim saints and Sufi mystics. Their voices are heard in blank verse, couplets and tercets, the fragmented expression of trauma and the solid block of "Imaginary Prisons." There is metamorphosis and the metaphysical, medieval texts and "unfathomable language."  

Many poems occupy liminal space, like St Bede, "half here half not, caught / in this blue land between dust and light." There is "The pleasure and power of speaking other" of "Trying to write beyond words." And there is "The shock of mortality [which] changes things." "So now, this first spring without you, the earth struck by war again, / I’m learning to hear the beauty of stitchwort, / kindness, birdsong." 

Rosie Jackson writes of a beloved tutor and friend, cruelly lost to a stroke, "She described this world as a palimpsest, layer upon layer / of meaning waiting to be peeled away." The same can  be said of this wonderful collection of poems.

About the reviewer
Sue Mackrell has an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University and lectured in Creative writing there. Now retired from teaching and facilitating workshops, her work has been published in a range of English and Welsh print anthologies, and online, including in several editions of Agenda, Ekphrastic Review, Whirlagust, Bloody Amazing, The Dawntreader and Prole. In summer 2023 she won the Archaeology Festival Haiku competition – they were the most lucrative 17 syllables of her writing career!

Review by Kathy Hoyle of "These Envoys of Beauty" by Anna Vaught

These Envoys of Beauty is a stunning memoir in which Anna Vaught’s prose sparkles with detailed observations of the natural world, contrasting sharply with a deep-rooted emotional response to childhood trauma. "When I was very young, and would run out or just stand and stare, I would look to plants and trees to help me explain to myself a bewildering world."

Structured as twelve separate essays, this memoir is journey of learning and discovery for both the writer and the reader. Vaught shares her vast knowledge of the natural world throughout, and by structuring the work in this way, the memoir becomes all the more manageable for the reader, especially when we must also traverse the deep, emotional revelations in each section. In the pause between each essay, we are able to breathe, process and decompress before beginning again, entering into the next deeply absorbing experience. And have no doubt, each essay is a completely immersive experience, exhilarating yet emotionally arduous in equal measure, a vivid sensory delight, juxtaposed with the trauma discussed. Vaught protects her reader wisely: much is implied throughout,  and though Vaught writes with vital honesty, she is never brutal. 

In her opening essay, Vaught declares, "My mother said mental health problems were an indulgence," and each essay delves further into a child’s journey through a world of shadows and unspoken truths, a world of fear and shame, where a girl is made to feel as though she is nothing but a "sufferance."  But this is also the story of a child who is curious, and despite her harsh reality, she finds beauty in the natural world around her, in the landscapes and seascapes, in dens and hollows, caves and cliffsides, in the trees and flowers, the roaring weirs and crashing waves. The child deftly slips between reality and imagination, between nature and dreams. 

This memoir embraces the wildness of nature and its cyclical patterns, and the writer truly finds comfort in the both the darkness and the light that nature provides: "One of my favourite things to this day is the nimbostratus, whose effect you feel and see: imagine the sun on your skin and light illuminating the sand. Then darkness and everything changes colour. This sudden shift is a moment of ecstasy for me in its drama. I also like sudden, powerful belts of rain, never more so than when I am by the sea. Standing in the water while being pelted – assuming you are not too cold – brings me to myself."

Despite the terrible echoes of Vaught’s past running through this memoir, there is also hope and a certain defiance in the writing which I found hugely admirable: "Epilobium angustifolium. My maternal grandmother called it fireweed, and my father said you could not kill it – which was exactly what I liked about it. It thrived."

In this examination of her "self" and her childhood memories, Vaught brings great comfort and hope to others with her resilience. I cried often when reading the essays, but I smiled too, at the beauty of them, at the hope within them. I wanted to champion the curious little girl Vaught once was, stroke her hair and lay in a meadow with her as the clouds scud above us and tell her that, one day, she will be okay. But I sense that Vaught is already one step ahead of me. In writing these essays, Vaught has reclaimed both her "self" and her power, and with her ongoing connection to the natural world, she has fashioned a protective shield. I love how Vaught has defiantly built new associations with natural world, casting off many of her childhood fears and associations, as she moves through adulthood, creating newer, safer memories: "But here was determination, and I wonder if it is strongest in those who are repeatedly told they should not survive or deserve to, who are told it would have been better if they had not been born."

I found These Envoys of Beauty such a beautiful and deeply moving memoir. It is one which will stay with me for a very long time. 

About the reviewer
Kathy Hoyle is a working-class writer of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in various literary magazines including Northern Gravy, Lunate, Ellipsiszine, Fictive Dream and The Forge. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She lives in a sleepy Warwickshire village and when she's not writing, she enjoys singing Dolly Parton songs to her long-suffering labradoodle, Eddie. 

You can read more about These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Richard Byrt of "The Truth at the End of the Night" by Malka Al-Haddad

 

The poems in Malka Al-Haddad’s collection, The Truth at the End of the Night, are powerful and very moving, as noted by Emma Lee in her Foreword, and by three reviewers at the start of the book. A strength of the collection is the inclusion of short and long poems. The shorter poems often include moving ideas and images, described with admirable brevity and economy of words. There are poems about the wars and atrocities in Iraq, as well as  love, home and hope. Some of the poems (for example, "American Propaganda" and "Love and War") include interesting juxtapositions of opposing ideas.

Black and white illustrations by George Sfourgas complement the poems movingly and effectively to portray the "pain, struggle, bravery and sorrow," which Malka so vividly describes. There are striking images throughout the collection. For example:

          I was told in secrecy that the land I loved
          does not want me to grow wheat or fruit here,
          I only grow cacti.

Vivid, surreal images are used to describe disturbing experiences: 

          Put my head in the chimney
          To speed up the burning of waiting and scattered memories,
          Put the spoons in the fridge.
          Put shoes to sleep on the pillow.

Some of the poems are redolent with memories of home – contrasted with the starkness of war:

          Remember if Tony Blair had not stormed my country
          With his war chariot
          I would now be drinking cardamon tea
          With my brothers and the children of my neighbourhood.
          If he had not occupied my country
          I would have fallen asleep
          On my mother’s pillow smelling of incense.

Malka’s "Introduction: Author’s Journey" provides an additional vivid account of her experience of war in Iraq over several decades, and its devastating effects on herself and her family.  Malka describes how "discovering poetry was life-changing" and how she "confronted [her] ... pain by working as an advocate in human rights issues in order to raise the voice of the oppressed, and that of [her] ... family." Malka also refers to ten years of rejected applications for asylum in the UK, and being moved by "the Home Office … from place to place":

After ten years of Home Office challenges,

still their hands are spiders mapping

bullets in the walls of my sanctuary.

Another poem describes the unpleasant experiences of being detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre ("Yarl’s Wood"). This poem is a contrast to the images of hope in "Psychiatrist’s Prescription":

          At sunset
          I go to the sea to complain about my bad luck.
          Feed the birds.
          Write poetry.
          Butterflies invite me to dance with them.
          The doctor said: All this is beautiful
          You do not need medicines …
          Keep singing with birds.
          This gives you eternal happiness.
          And you feel completely free.

Elsewhere, there are expressions of hope. I really like the lovely lines: "Exile is the place / Where the light releases your voice" and:

          My heart is a dark room
          And as I fell in love with you
          The wind opened all the windows and the sun entered me.

Malka’s collection ends with the lines: “and there the bird without sky was able to nest / And the bird rose soaring through the sky." As Pam Thompson writes at the start of the collection: "Love will always be home and family for Al-Haddad, yet in their absences, marriage and love of nature and the solace of specific memories, their images shining brightly within the poems: schoolbooks, birds, a grandmother’s song, a wooden table.” 

Some of Malka Al-Haddad’s verse is majestic and reminds me of the language of the 1611 King James Bible. I particularly like the stately cadences of:

          A campaigner against the madness of the military
          A speaker to liberate the inhabitants of other villages
          From the intensity of the horror of the moment
          He and his soldiers froze in their place like statues
          From that day on, he and his generals became statues.

A few lines later, Malka writes: "That’s why all birds now poop on the heads of statues" – a great and unexpected contrast to the lines above!  

In conclusion, I strongly recommend The Truth at the End of the Night. The collection includes moving, powerful and vivid descriptions and images of the pains of war, exile, and an appallingly difficult and long process of seeking asylum, as well as of hope, love and family.  All proceeds from purchases of the collection are "donated to City of Sanctuary UK." 

Congratulations to Malka Al-Haddad, to George Sfourgaras for illustrations which complement the poems so well, and to Camilla Reeve and Palewell Press for publishing the collection and making Malka’s work available to a wider audience.      

About the reviewer
Since retirement from his "day job," Richard Byrt has tried to develop his writing of poems. He facilitates Creative Writing at SoundCafe, Leicester: a charity for people with many diverse backgrounds and talents, who have experienced homelessness.