Alan Fielden
Throw,
the first stone, lover.
Who brought me from nothing
and to whom I have given less.
If I lie and promise sunlight,
would you understand.
And when I flail, through glassy words and porous silence.
Can I smile and say,
“That wasn’t me”?
Whilst the moon, calm and bare, reflects the inferno so honestly?
That three-tier phrase, the pyrrhic one,
that means one to the mouth
and two to the ear,
how far can you throw it?
Trust it thus.
Before love there was a feeling that needed a name.
We gathered today to live and love;
ever after there will be nothing ever was …

Reality Hunger
by David Shields
Hamish Hamilton; Hardback;
240 pages; Price £17.99;
ISBN 9780241144992
Dan Eltringham
First, a series of radical pronouncements: narrative prose fiction has ‘never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself’; the ‘novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia’; and, more generally, ‘forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: because they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive.’ Having disposed of the novel Reality Hunger then announces, with a further valedictory flourish, that the writer as writer is dead, to be replaced …

The Loss Adjustor
Aifric Campbell
Demy Hardback
250 pages
ISBN: 9781846687303
Daniel Hudspith
The Loss Adjustor is a novel about disconnection, about how occurrences in one’s life can cause fissures in relationships, in perception and, ultimately, in oneself. The titular character, Caroline, is haunted by events in her childhood and has retreated to the relative safety of a mundane existence low on the ladder at an insurance firm. Her childhood sweetheart is now a rock superstar, while her mother exists only to read books about history and arctic exploration, abnegating herself from any normal child-parent relationship. …

THE LAST PATRIARCH
Najat El-Hachmi
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010
Alice Kelly
Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers, Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over …

Stephanie Yorke

Chemistry never rests. Something’s converted
each time, given time. I eroded
on the bench, under the organ pipes,
God’s own woofers and tweeters,
oxidizing lime tears,
sound’s empathetic breakdown.
Enter Miss Dennis, chiming: Mavis
check your posture. Straightening
my hymnal spine. Play
it open. Now stopped. Again,
stopped. Her fingering over mine:
a splint for weak music,
pacing the floor.
Now, from the top. Remember,
Jacob lost – despite his rock jaw
and herdsman’s fists –
his opponent had better wind.
Don’t slow down, she said.
The work’s like swimming,
or not drowning:
this stroke doesn’t count
without the next.