Barney Bardsley

By Barney Bardsley It is rare – at least for this reviewer and voracious reader – to find books that are near impossible to put down. Books pulsing with vitality and daring, with heart-felt emotion, humour and daring at their centre. Francis Spufford’s first novel, Golden Hill, set in eighteenth century New York, and brim-full of unforgettable characters and events, was one. And Nonesuch, his third work of fiction, is another.

By Barney Bardsley The beginning of Sarah Rainsford’s story is not on page one of this book, but on page 43. Here, she writes, “Two weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, I landed in Moscow with a suitcase full of cheese sauce mix and chocolate, and a guidebook to a country that had ceased to exist.” This was January 1992, and Rainsford was just 18 years old. She had come to Russia to teach English for five months.

By Barney Bardsley When wildlife writer Kate Bradbury started to write this book, in April 2022, she was filled with worry for the endless dry days we were experiencing, as hardly a drop of rain fell. (This was followed by the heatwave of July 2022, when temperatures reached a record 40 degrees centigrade, even in our cooler UK northern cities.) It felt strange to be reading her words now, in 2024, when – at least for the first half of the year – it never stopped raining at all.