Joanna Di Mattia

Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton

Review — 23 Sep 2024

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

I’ll start at the end and say that when I finished reading Our Evenings I felt quite bereft. I can’t recall when I was last so invested in the lives…

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Blog post — 25 Jul 2024

A beginner's guide to Irish fiction

For a small country, Ireland has produced a significant volume of literature with widespread cultural impact. It continues to do so, counting among its successes six Booker Prize winners and…

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Review — 23 Jun 2024

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker

I have a special place in my heart for group biographies, especially of women writers and artists working in the first half of the 20th century. Wonderful then to be…

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Review — 19 May 2024

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

Anna lives in an apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. It’s 2019. In her late 30s, she’s recently suffered a painful miscarriage and has deferred returning to work as…

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Review — 26 Feb 2024

Practice by Rosalind Brown

Scholarly success demands a certain ascetic discipline and Annabel, the protagonist of Rosalind Brown’s exceptional debut novel, thinks she’s adopted all the right habits. She’s spending a cold Sunday at…

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Blog post — 8 Dec 2023

Bookseller spotlight: Joanna Di Mattia’s favourite books of 2023

Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.

I made an early declaration this year that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos would be the best novel I’d read in 2023, and…

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Review — 31 Jul 2023

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a course in women’s art history that ran over multiple semesters and offered a historical survey. I encountered art…

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Review — 31 Jul 2023

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck & Michael Hofmann (trans.)

The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel refers to a tenet of ancient Greek philosophy – the idea of the right or critical moment to act. Just how kairos impacts…

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Review — 3 Jul 2023

George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes

I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her…

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Review — 3 Jul 2023

Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key

What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective…

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