A dreamscape of transcendental potential: Rhett Davis’ Arborescence is at once terrifying and bewitching

Davis addresses all the big-ticket concerns of our time: artificial intelligence, ecological disaster, societal decay, colonial culpability and overconsumption

Contemporary crime fiction has moved beyond conventional genre tropes

Just don’t call it ‘literary’

A lost woman looks for purpose in a Guatemalan lakeside town

In The Sun Was Electric Light, Ruth arrives at Lake Atitlán a loner-searcher. But the people she meets are crucial to her struggles with the question of how to live

Roland Barthes declared the ‘death of the author’, but postcolonial critics have begged to differ

Roland Barthes’ notion that the author is dead has been incredibly influential, though it was not as original or revolutionary as it seemed

James Bradley’s thrilling, unsettling crime novel is set in a flooded Sydney in 2050

‘Ambitious’ or ‘pretentious’?

The contested legacy of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North