Sandra Newman Journalist Profile

Articles

The Catchers by Xan Brooks review - this dark picaresque is a delight

Oct 10, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

Xan Brooks’s second novel begins with John Coughlin, a rookie “song-catcher” on his first trip to backwoods Appalachia to trawl for hill country music. For a three-minute “side”, the record company will pay a flat rate of $30 – a princely sum in 1927, at least to the subsistence farmers who make the music. But if a track takes off and sells millions, that’s all the musician will ever see.
Elaine by Will Self review - all about my mother

Aug 29, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

Will Self has a history of gonzo premises. He has written novels set in the afterlife, in a world ruled by chimpanzees, in a post-apocalyptic society based on the misogynist rantings of a London cabby. When his characters aren’t engaged in necrophilia, they’re fighting off swarms of hungry sharks.
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry review - a wild western

Jun 12, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

The hero of Kevin Barry’s new novel, The Heart in Winter, is a dope-fiend Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. Tom Rourke has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east.
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru review - art monsters

May 9, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

Blue Ruin opens with the protagonist, Jay, delivering groceries to a palatial home in a rich enclave of upstate New York. On the doorstep his customer stands masked; this is happening in the early days of the Covid lockdown. Thus it takes him a moment to recognise Alice, his girlfriend from another life. Twenty years before, Jay and Alice lived together in London. He was then an up-and-coming Young British Artist, and she an aspiring curator.
Bibliophile | 'Julia' retells Orwell's '1984' from a new perspective

May 7, 2024 | outinperth.com | Sandra Newman

Juliaby Sandra NewmanGrantaJulia Worthing is a mechanic, working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. She fixes novel-writing machines and is a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League. She lives in a female only dormitory and she is being watched all the time – for she lives in the world created by George Orwell’s 1984 which was published in 1949. - Advertisement -Britain is now called Airstrip One and has been absorbed into the larger trans-Atlantic nation of Oceania.
Practice by Rosalind Brown review - tea, yoga and sonnets

Mar 27, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

This debut novelfollows a day in the life of Annabel, an Oxford student writing an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. She wakes and makes tea, works on the essay, meditates, does yoga, works a little more, takes walks, has memories and fantasies, eats in the dining hall, talks to her boyfriend on the phone. The book ends as the day ends. For most of the novel, she’s alone in her room. It is an uneventful day in a safe, cocooned, mostly uneventful life.
My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld review - a transgressive tour de force

Jan 31, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sandra Newman

My Heavenly Favourite, the second novel from acclaimed Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld, belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise.
Julia | Bookreporter.com

Oct 28, 2023 | bookreporter.com | Sandra Newman

If you're like me, it's been a while since you've read George Orwell's 1984. The good news is that as soon as you pick up Sandra Newman's JULIA --- a feminist reimagining of that classic novel --- everything you remember about 1984 is likely to come flooding back.
A New, Feminist Retelling of ‘1984’

Oct 24, 2023 | news.nestia.com | Sandra Newman

JULIA, by Sandra NewmanAt the outset of “Julia” — Sandra Newman’s retelling of George Orwell’s classic “1984,” this time as seen by Winston Smith’s love interest, Julia — we learn that our protagonist is a mechanic in the Fiction Department. Fiction, along with Records and Research, makes up the Ministry of Truth, which is responsible for producing the official narrative of Oceania, and, since Oceania is a totalitarian state, producing history itself.
Sandra Newman's novel 'Julia,' feminist twist on Orwell's '1984'

Oct 21, 2023 | exactrelease.org | Peter Maccoy |Sandra Newman

ReviewJulia By Sandra NewmanMariner: 400 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The literary term “anastrophe” refers to the technique of reversing word order in a sentence for effect.