Jack Nicholson, in the 1975 movie “The passenger”, plays a character who switches his identity with that of someone recently deceased.   Sean Sheehan   A novel with the same title, “The passenger”, was written almost four decades earlier but remained virtually unknown for seventy years. Its main character is […]

“If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystem would collapse”.   Sean Sheehan   David Attenborough’s startling statement is quoted by the author of a […]

These three short novels by Sylvia Townsend Warner, written in the 1920s and ‘30s, show the author to be one of the most underappreciated of 20th century British writers of fiction.   Sean Sheehan   The stories have very different settings and characters and are testimony to the imaginative range […]

The rainbow colours and bold graphics of publications for young children throw into low relief the grey print of grown-ups’ books.   Sean Sheehan   Young minds love tales of soaring imagination and worlds of magical transformations where animals converse and the laws of physics are blissfully ignored. But heroism […]