Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 27, Issue 8, 1 Aug 2025

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IN THIS ISSUE

New Reviews at Compulsive Reader
Literary News
Competition News
Sponsored By
Coming soon

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Hello readers. Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

Poetry for the Looming Past: A review of House of Jars by Hester L. Furey

I must admit that when I encountered this text for the first time, I was flung far out of my realm. House of Jars is brilliant in so many ways, and though I have long been an intimate friend of poetry, I was at first daunted by the intellectual challenges that this work presented. The opportunity to explore this work served doubly as another step forward along my academic journey, and once I learned to speak its language, I found House of Jars to be a delightfully rewarding challenge, to which I hope I rose valiantly. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/30/poetry-for-the-looming-past-a-review-of-house-of-jars-by-hester-l-furey/

A review of More Lies (audiobook version) by Richard James Allen

Because I also enjoy listening to audio, a medium that is able to fit in spaces where books might not, for example, while driving, I was delighted to hear that More Lies has just been released in an audio version. The audiobook, narrated by Allen himself, utilises his terrific acting ability in order to really draw out some of those themes. The narration is by turns wry, ironic, even slapstick at times, but always engaging. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/27/a-review-of-more-lies-audiobook-version-by-richard-james-allen/

A review of The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis Through Metaphor by Regina Colonia-Willner

The connection between poetry and Jungian analysis is clearly presented; however, a reader would be justified in coming away from this book with two ideas: that the book is aimed more at psychoanalysts, not poets, despite the extensive references to poets’ thoughts and citations from their work, and that the link between poetry and Jungian analysis is less a link and more a continuous flow, as they infuse each other. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/25/a-review-of-the-intersection-of-poetry-and-jungian-analysis-through-metaphor-by-regina-colonia-willner/

A review of The Hole in Your Life by Bob Rich

Bob Rich is an expert on the subject. He has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years, both in a clinical practice and through extensive volunteering of his services in multiple forums. He also has firsthand experience of the most intense kind of grief, having recenly experienced the loss of his own daughter Natalie to liver cancer in December 2024. The Hole in Your Life, Rich’s 20th book, is dedicated to Natalie and draws heavily on both personal experience and Rich’s extensive clinical understanding of the many pathways grief can take. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/23/a-review-of-the-hole-in-your-life-by-bob-rich/

A review of The Foal in the Wire by Robbie Coburn

Coburn’s language moves fluidly between straightforward prose to soaring poetic imagery, particularly around the central character, the foal. Sam learns to make new meaning in a harsh environment, which is beyond alcohol, blame, and violence; finding communication and care is a purer way to relate to the world. Coburn’s verse novel is a beautifully written and visceral bildungsroman, which speaks like a scared whisper from broken men in rural settings; about men trying to learn how to nurture others, and in turn nurture themselves. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/21/a-review-of-the-foal-in-the-wire-by-robbie-coburn/

A review of 18 Shticks by Margarita Meklina

At forty-five pages, 18 Shticks isn’t a long collection, but it covers a lot of ground. Individually these are stories of ordinary lives made surreal through life’s twists, through close examination, and through a sense that just beneath the surface of any situation, there is another reality simmering. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/19/a-review-of-18-shticks-by-margarita-meklina/

A review of It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, by Tom McAllister

There’s something special about finding within a book ourselves, to see pieces of us reflected back to us on a page; there’s something special, too, about getting a peek into a world that feels far removed from our every day, about an escape that teaches us something about someone fully unlike ourselves. For me, Impossible bridged this line between selfishness and empathy, between the joy at shared experience and the curiosity at learning about someone who’s nothing like I am. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/18/a-review-of-it-all-felt-impossible-42-years-in-42-essays-by-tom-mcallister/

A review of Fragmentation and Volta by Paul Ilechko

The collection may end with the word “home” but that word is followed by an ellipsis, that punctuation mark which means that something has been left out. Here at the end, it alludes not only to the contents being fragmentary but to the whole collection itself being a fragment. The book itself is a border, a liminal space inviting everything unsaid to gather around it. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/16/a-review-of-fragmentation-and-volta-by-paul-ilechko/

A review of Twelve Days From Transfer by Eleanor Kedney

This collection is wonderfully vast with its symbolism and imagery that will surely challenge readers to think about infertility differently. Kedney’s intention of her work being a vessel for other woman to understand infertility’s emotional and psychological impact is enlightening, especially as I am a young woman in her twenties—infertility hasn’t crossed my mind yet Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/15/a-review-of-twelve-days-from-transfer-by-eleanor-kedneyy/

A review of The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Moving from present to past with slim reflective passages, the novel examines more than individual responses to violence; it investigates cultural dissonance and our innate need to place blame on ourselves or the other, whoever that may be, and sometimes it’s us in an earlier life. A powerful examination of memory, resilience, reckoning, and acceptance, Di Pietrantonio’s novel marries fact with fiction to create a novel driven by secrets that must be relinquished and failings that must be acknowledged. It’s about honesty and truth. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/11/a-review-of-the-brittle-age-by-donatella-di-pietrantonio/

A review of Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch

Ephraim’s own journey to self-discovery is itself a terrific story, but what really makes Ferryman stand out is the silky, almost surreal quality of Katia Ariel’s writing. Ariel leans into the complexity of biography, its subjectivity, the interpretations perspectives, and gaps, to create a delicate and complex portrait that feels true precisely because it doesn’t connect every dot. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/09/a-review-of-ferryman-the-life-and-deathwork-of-ephraim-finch/

A review of Elis – Irish Call Girl by Anna Rajmon

Rajmon is as sharp and thoughtful as she is hilarious – in telling her story, she misses nothing regarding her experience. The picture she paints of the Irish prostitution scene is a comprehensive and complex one – from how accommodation is obtained, to how advertising is organized, to how meetings are arranged, to how travel from location to location is organized, to the power dynamics between sex workers, ‘clients’ and ‘agencies’ (‘pimps’ would be a more accurate term) – Rajmon lays it all out in black-and-white. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/08/a-review-of-elis-irish-call-girl-by-anna-rajmon/

A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Multigeneration Story Unlike Pachinko or One Hundred Years of Solitude

Although traditional readers might classify the 2007 work as historical fiction given its backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war in Kabul, the work is anything but your run-of-the-mill war novel. Through a mother-daughter story that focuses neither on a mother nor on her successive kin, Hosseini crafts a compelling narrative spanning generations that makes you question everything you thought you knew about a multigenerational (multigen) story. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/07/a-thousand-splendid-suns-a-multigeneration-story-unlike-pachinko-or-one-hundred-years-of-solitude/

A review of Unruly Tree by Leslie Ullman

And only a poet blessed with imagination and a solid understanding of poetics could embark on a project such as Leslie Ullman has devised here. Using “Oblique Strategies” as a basis for a disciplined exploration of the boundless possibilities of creative interpretation, she has produced a series of informed, entertaining and highly individual poems. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/06/a-review-of-unruly-tree-by-leslie-ullman/

A review of Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino

This is no ordinary collection. The Bertino omnibus features a Guignol-esque cast of characters readers will readily recognize because, flights of abstruse and absurd fancy aside, they abide and strive, hungry ducklings all, within each of us. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/05/a-review-of-exit-zero-by-marie-helene-bertino/

Maya in the Zen Forest: A review of The Forest I Know By Kala Ramesh

The “forest” of the forest i know is essentially a metaphorical Zen forest where the poet learns life’s trust as well as its tedium. She humorously notes the many gurus along herpath and their lack of utility in her enlightenment. In Zen, a master is not necessary to experience satori, which is a sudden realization into the human experience. In this practice, the master pulls punches and jokes to encourage enlightenment. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/03/maya-in-the-zen-forest-a-review-of-the-forest-i-know-by-kala-ramesh/

A Paradise Within Thee: A Review of Happier Far by Diane Mehta

Mehta’s mind thinks in music. We understand this musical schema because of Mehta’s mother, who took her to the symphony when she was a child. Mehta describes the feeling she had after the concert, “by the time I returned to our night-sky driveway I would have violins and trumpets in my bones” (46). Currently, Mehta is the poet-in-residence at New Chamber Ballet. Knowing this conjures up a sweet sensation, like the taste of honey on the tongue. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/07/02/a-paradise-within-thee-a-review-of-happier-far-by-diane-mehta/

All of the reviews and interviews listed above are available at The Compulsive Reader on the front page. Older reviews and interviews are kept indefinitely in our extensive categorised archives (currently at 3,563) which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

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LITERARY NEWS

In the news this month, Selina Tusitala Marsh has been appointed the inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate, serving until 31 May 2027. Born in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish, and French heritage. She has served as New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019 and published three poetry collections (Fast Talking PI, Dark Sparring and Tightrope) and the graphic memoir series Mophead (all Auckland University Press). According to the Commonwealth Foundation, the role involves working on behalf of the Commonwealth to reach its 2.7 billion citizens through poetry. Marsh will write poems for events, advise on the foundation’s creative programming, and appear at the Commonwealth People’s Forum and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda in 2026. More information is available on the Commonwealth Foundation website here: https://commonwealthfoundation.com/poetlaureate2025/

Australian Minister for the Arts Tony Burke launched Writing Australia and announced the Writing Australia Council members this week. Writing Australia is responsible for supporting and promoting the Australian literature sector and the development of markets and audiences for Australian literature and will receive over $26 million over three years. The full list of members and their action plan timeline, which includes designing the poet laureate program, can be found here: https://creative.gov.au/writing-australia

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) announced Fiona McFarlane as the winner of the 2025 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal for Highway 13 (A&U), and Hasib Hourani as the winner of its 2025 Mary Gilmore Prize for rock flight (Giramondo), as well as the winners of a suite of academic and criticism prizes.

Chanel Sutherland was named overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and will receive £5,000 for “Descend,” in which enslaved Africans share their life stories as the ship transporting them sinks. The literary magazine Granta has published all the regional winning stories, which will also be available in a special print collection from Paper + Ink.

Longlists have been selected for the “new-look” Wainwright Prizes, which honour “exceptional nature and conservation” and “spotlight writing and illustration that celebrate the natural world and inspire readers of all ages to protect it.” The prizes have expanded to six categories: nature writing, conservation writing, illustrative books, children’s fiction, children’s nonfiction, and children’s picture books. See the longlists here: https://wainwrightprize.com/news/longlists-and-judging-panels-announced-for-2025-wainwright-prizes/

The winners in a dozen categories of the Crime Writers’ Association 2025 Dagger Awards include the KAA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year, which went to Anna Mazzola for The Book of Secrets, and the ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger, which was won by Katy Massey for All Us Sinners. Mick Herron won the Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement in crime writing, which was announced in the spring. Check out the full list of winners here: https://thecwa.co.uk/awards-and-competitions/the-daggers/

Elly Griffiths was named this year’s winner of the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award, in recognition of her crime fiction writing career and “unwavering commitment to the genre.” The award will be presented at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival on July 17, alongside the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the McDermid Debut Award for new writers. Griffiths is shortlisted for the 2025 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for The Last Word (Quercus Books.)

Dobby Gibson has won the 2025 Four Quartets Prize for his poem “Hold Everything” from the collection Hold Everything (Graywolf Press). Sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the prize celebrates the multipart poem and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in the U.S. in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book. Judges also selected CAConrad, for Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books), and Morgan Võ, for “To Market” from The Selkie (The Song Cave) as finalists. Gibson receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $1,000.

Leila Aboulela won the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer residing in the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, or the former Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature speech, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world and shows a “fierce intellectual determination… to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” Aboulela will be honoured October 10 during a ceremony at the British Library, where she will deliver an address. The prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, “who is active in defense of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty.” The co-winner, selected by Aboulela from a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the ceremony.

Finalists have been selected in two categories for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, honouring “writers whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.” Winners are awarded $10,000, and the first runners-up receive $5,000. The winners and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award will be named in September. The winners, first runners-up, and other finalists will be honoured at an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, the weekend of November 8-9. The full list can be found here: https://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/

Ursula Krechel has won the €50,000 Georg Büchner Prize, awarded annually by the German Academy for Language and Literature to authors “writing in the German language whose work is considered especially meritorious and who have made a significant contribution to contemporary German culture.” One of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards, the prize is named in honour of the author of the influential German play, Woyzeck.

Margaret McDonald and her editors, Alice Swan and Ama Badu, won the 2025 Branford Boase Award for Glasgow Boys. The award honors the author and editor(s) of a debut novel for young people. The author gets £1,000 for the win, and she and the editors receive engraved trophies.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon) has won the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, which is judged exclusively by incarcerated readers and is sponsored by Freedom Reads in collaboration with the National Book Foundation, the Center for Justice Innovation, and Interabang Books co-owner Lori Feathers. Some 300 people incarcerated in six states and territories across the country voted on the prize. More information on the prize can be found here: https://freedomreads.org/showing-up/inside-literary-prize

Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted won the £3,000 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, which “celebrates crime fiction at its very best” by U.K. and Irish authors. The judges described Hunted as “a thought-provoking, intriguingly taut, propulsive and highly original thriller.” The £500 (about $675) McDermid Debut Award went to David Goodman for A Reluctant Spy. Chair of judges McDermid called the winning title “a sparkling new entry in the canon, with a vivid and unfamiliar setting as well as a gripping cast of characters.” The prize is run by Harrogate International Festivals and sponsored by T&R Theakston. Both winners also receive an engraved oak beer cask, hand-carved by one of Britain’s last coopers from Theakston’s Brewery. Novelist Elly Griffiths received this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of her remarkable crime fiction writing career and “unwavering commitment to the genre.”

The longlist has been selected for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, which “honors the best debut novel of the year and supports emerging voices in fiction.” The winner, who receives $15,000 prize “in recognition of their contribution to contemporary literature and in support of their ongoing creative career,” will be named December 9 at the Center for Fiction First Novel Fête in New York City. Each author on the shortlist, which will be released this fall, gets $1,000. Full longlist can be found here: https://centerforfiction.org/book-recs/2025-first-novel-prize/

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu (University of Queensland Press) has won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, honoring “the novel of the highest literary merit which presents Australian life in any of its phases.” Lu receives A$60,000.

Swift River by Essie Chambers (Simon & Schuster) has won the $15,000 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which is given to an emerging African American fiction writer, celebrates the legacy of the late Ernest Gaines, and is sponsored by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has won the £5,000 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The company wrote, “An intoxicating tale of art, love and secrets set across a sun-drenched Provençal summer in 1920, Steeds’s masterly debut revolves around a fabled, reclusive painter, an aspiring British journalist set on penning a piece on him, and the artist’s seemingly unworldly niece Ettie who harbors an explosive secret. Blending mystery and slow-burning romance with lush, cinematic prose and exquisite characterization, The Artist is an absorbing study in monstrous egos, self-discovery and the power of art, filled with dexterous detail for the senses.”

The longlist has been selected for the $75,000 Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University, and can be seen here: https://www.cundillprize.com/news/the-2025-cundill-history-prize-longlist. Organisers said that the titles on the longlist “shed light on compelling stories that span continents and generations, taking us from the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s to the German Peasants’ War of 1524; from Soviet dissidents in the 1960s to American and Australian abolitionists of the 1800s.”

Finally, the longlist for the Booker Prize has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. The thirteen titles along with the judges comments, videos and interviews with the judges can be found here: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2025. The shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on Tuesday, 23 September 2025. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The announcement of the winning book  will take place on Monday, 10 November 2025 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels. The winner receives £50,000.

Have a great month.

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Anita Yancey who won a copy of Tiny Vices by Linda Dahl.

Congratulations to Penelope Cottier, who won a copy of The Heart of the Advocate by Angela Costi.

Our new giveaway is for a copy of Alighting in Time by Lynne Wycherley. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Alighting in time” and your postal address in the body of the mail.

Good luck!

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