Lucy Scholes

London

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Host at Ourshelves Podcast

Columnist at The Paris Review

Senior Editor @McNallyEditions | words @TelegraphBooks @ftweekend @nybooks @prospect_uk @nytimesbooks @TheTLS etc

Articles

This young British novelist is succeeding where others fail

2 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Lucy Scholes

A certain dispassionate, matter-of-fact prose style has become characteristic of too much contemporary fiction: my heart now reflexively sinks when I encounter it. In such novels, the narrators observe their own lives with the practiced, measured eye of anthropologists. Often they are, as Armstrong's narrator calls them, "vaguely disembodied cerebral girls".
Gunk review – unconventional baby love in Brighton | The Observer

3 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Lucy Scholes

GunkSaba SamsBloomsbury, £16.99, pp240Saba Sams was just 26 when her debut short story collection, Send Nudes, won the 2022 Edge Hill short story prize, and one of the tales therein, Blue 4eva, won the BBC national short story award. A writer clearly worth watching. The anticipation for her first novel was heightened when she was picked for Granta’s once-in-a-decade best of young British novelists list. Now that first novel is here and she is still only 29.
A Dead Cat on Your Table by Peter York

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Robert Bevan |Lenni Sanders |James Cook |Lucy Scholes

To access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe here‘Ground zero for the liberal elite’A guide to various culture war types What a peculiar book this is. Peter York, best known for his cod-anthropological examination of British society’s various snobby tribes, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), has turned his attention to the culture wars.
To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Lucy Scholes

Welcome to the TLSTo access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe here
The Mermaid Chronicles by Megan Dunn

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | James Cook |Lenni Sanders |Lucy Scholes

To access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe hereUnderwater portraitsThe elusiveness of professional mermaids“I was staring down the barrel of middle age, and my pockets were empty”, writes Megan Dunn in her illuminating memoir, The Mermaid Chronicles.
The Propagandist — Cécile Desprairies’ novel explores her family’s wartime shame

1 month ago | ft.com | Lucy Scholes

This story opens in an apartment building in Paris’s 17th arrondissement.
this novel grasps real women's lives

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Lucy Scholes

Cautery is the debut novel by Lucía Lijtmaer - a writer, journalist and cultural critic who was born in Argentina but raised in Barcelona - and also the first of her books (the rest of which have been essays and non-fiction) to be published in English. It begins in its author's adopted city.
The Weight of Their Art | Lucy Scholes

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Lucy Scholes

In the spring of 1942, the thirty-four-year-old artist and designer Tirzah Garwood resolved to start her memoirs. An accomplished wood engraver, illustrator, and maker of patterned papers, she had already produced an impressive body of creative work, but this was the first time she’d attempted a book.
Oba Electroplating Factory | Book review | The TLS

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Lucy Scholes

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
Helen Garner’s diaries — glittering shards of experience

Mar 4, 2025 | ft.com | Lucy Scholes

Destined, surely, to take her place among the great chroniclers of lived literary experience — Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Alan Bennett...