ToHellWithPublishing

Lucy Langdon on The Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico

A truly delightful read. Light and cheerful, but serious and peculiar at the same time. I’ve read this book many times in my life and it never fails to lift me. The heroine, Mouche, is desperate for comfort and very nearly resorts to the time honoured solution of suicide. However, she is brought back from the [...]

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Lucy Langdon on A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The hardback dust cover of this hand-achingly huge novel is shot through with fuscia bullet holes, and that’s a bit how you’ll feel when you read it: emotionally punctured but simultaneously tickled a heartwarming shade of pink. A son narrates the story of his dad, ‘the most hated man in Australia’, and his uncle, ‘the most [...]

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Richard Milward on The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

The literary equivalent of having a bad trip on your hols in 1930s Persia, Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl is a heady, cannibalistic feast for the senses. Narrated by an opium-smoking necrophilia-enthusiast, the book is possibly the most horrific love story ever written, following a painter of pen-cases’ descent into psychosis over a woman [...]

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