Page 2 - River Called Time News Today

Published: 12:00 PM March 4, 2021    Newham Bookshops Vivian Archer says this years World Book Day boasts a great selection, with the retailer continuing her efforts to get the borough reading. - Credit: Ken Mears "Its always a great selection and this year is no different." The manager of Newham Bookshop has waxed lyrical about this years World Book Day offering, with hundreds of books in store ready to be distributed to Newham children. Vivian Archer, whose independent shop soon celebrates ...

Courttia Newland was in his mid-twenties when he had his first out-of-body experience. Following the publication of his debut novel, The Scholar (1997), he lived in a shared flat in Ladbroke Grove, west London. One night, “I had this panic attack where I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and for some reason, instead of fighting, I decided to just relax,” he said. Calmly, he had the sense that he had left his body and was looking down at it as it lay on his bed. Night terrors were not n...

Review by Barry Didcock As well as being a novelist, playwright and co-editor of The Penguin Book Of New Black Writing In Britain, Courttia Newland co-wrote two of the five films in Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe anthology, which delved deep into the history of the black British experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Anyone expecting more of the same in A River Called Time can forget it, however: sprawling, ambitious, often thought-provoking and just as often baffling, Newland’s latest n...

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka (Bloomsbury) The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost 50 years promises “murder, mayhem and no shortage of drama” in contemporary Nigeria. The Thursday Murder Club 2 by Richard Osman (Viking) Last year the Pointless co-host’s cosy crime debut set in a retirement home broke sales records; here comes the sequel. Waters of Salvation by Richard Coles (W&N) A new crime series from everyone’s favourite vicar begins ...

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland review – a vivid alternate reality Adam Roberts © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Howard Kingsnorth/Getty Images It speaks to the hold TV still has over our culture that Courttia Newland, the author of seven novels and co-editor of The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, is best known today for the scripts he wrote for Steve McQueen’s BBC series Small Axe. Excellent scripts they are, too, and there is something tele...