Rosemary Goring

Rosemary Goring argues that Nicola Sturgeon has been subjected to excessive and often misogynistic abuse, including unjustified blame for her husband’s crimes despite a police investigation finding no evidence that she knew about them. The column acknowledges shortcomings in Sturgeon’s record, including mistakes during and after the Covid pandemic and controversies involving Alex Salmond and transgender policy, but highlights her commitment to public service, child poverty reduction, literacy and inspiring young people. It concludes that Sturgeon’s popularity at book festivals and her plans to write suggest a constructive life beyond politics, while the continuing campaign of vilification is unfair and damaging to public life.

Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World follows Tennyson Bouguereau, a formerly enslaved man recounting a life shaped by slavery, the American Civil War, racial violence and displacement. The review praises Barry’s restrained yet theatrical prose, his vivid creation of Tennyson’s conversational voice and his refusal to let historical suffering become clichéd or sentimental. Tennyson’s story intersects with the earlier novels Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, while focusing on the enduring trauma and disenfranchisement underlying modern America. The novel ultimately questions how civilisation could emerge from the guilt and violence of the United States’ past.

Rosemary Goring praises Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge as an understated but gripping novel about a Bengali writer on fellowship in Paris’s Goutte d’Or district. Through mundane experiences, family connections, memories of India and conflicts with the American Centre for Thought, the novel challenges romanticized ideas of Paris and shows how places become meaningful through lived experience rather than cultural expectation. Its observational style is compared favorably with Georges Perec’s documentary writing, while its meditation on place, time and history is linked to Chaudhuri’s broader literary strengths.

Three lesser-known novels by Neil M Gunn are reissued by North House Press to mark the centenary of his debut. The review highlights Gunn’s stature in Scottish literature, his distinctive style rooted in the landscapes of the north-east, and the thematic richness of The Grey Coast, The Serpent, and Blood Hunt. The new editions aim to revive interest in an author once considered Scotland’s greatest living writer but now largely forgotten by younger readers.