I’ve got a wee bit behind in shoving my journalism stuff up here, what with being on the other side of the world for a while, then picking up a shitty chest infection.

Anyway, while I was away, a few of my book reviews have emerged online, namely:

A review in The Big Issue of Jill Stark’s High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze (Scribe) along with a review of The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Canongate) by Olivia Laing. Two very interesting takes on writers and their relationship with the demon drink.

And here’s my Big Issue reviews of Sounds Like London (Serpent’s Tail) by Lloyd Bradley alongside Niccolò Ammaniti’s Let the Games Begin (Canongate). Didn’t manage a themed-review column, but two fascinating books, one on the history of black music in London, the other a crazy Italian satirical novel.

And here’s my review of D W Wilson’s debut novel Ballistics (Bloomsbury) in The Independent on Sunday. I loved his story collection, Once You Break a Knuckle, but I didn’t feel Ballistics lived up to that. Sorry, DW!

Dx