Alex R

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BookBrowse Reviewer Alex is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

Alex Russell is a freelance writer from Scotland, now living in France, who holds degrees in English Literature from the University of St Andrews and Charles University in Prague. When he’s not reading, he’s writing for 14 Degrees East, a blog focusing on his travels throughout Europe.

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (10)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease
by Thomas Levenson

(6/4/2025)

With So Very Small, his latest in a string of popular histories of science, Thomas Levenson attempts to educate the rest of us in how good we have things today. The book centers on the history of germ theory, tracing a centuries-long struggle to understand the microscopic lifeforms (bacteria and viruses) that were for so long the unknown root of so much of humanity's suffering. His focus is the story and, author of half a dozen history books, he is an experienced and gifted storytel

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Pretender: A Novel
by Jo Harkin

(4/23/2025)

After 500 years, Tudor history has every right to be stale. Its cut-throat court politics have been hashed and rehashed by novelists, poets, and playwrights since Henry VIII was still picking wives. So it's always worth sitting up and taking note when a writer arrives who can inject the genre with a little life—and Jo Harkin, author of Tell Me an Ending, is definitely one such writer. Her brilliant and inventive new novel, The Pretender, tells the extraordinary story

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Good Girl: A Novel
by Aria Aber

(2/12/2025)

Nila's past-tense narration comes from an ostensibly older and wiser place, but she's clearly kept her penchant for pretension. At one point she tells the reader how she is "troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories"; the reader, in turn, may be troubled by the complete earnestness with which she says this. The novel is far more interesting and Aber's writing skills far more affecting when trained on Nila's reckoning with her identity. Never having visited t

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Patriot: A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny

(11/20/2024)

Through it all, Navalny stays human. In a country run by stony-faced authoritarians, this was always his superpower. His damning investigative journalism, carried out with colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, proved his unflagging work ethic. But it was his easy-going charm and likability that made him such a fearsome political threat. In the pages of Patriot, these qualities are on full display. He is wonderfully alive—more alive in death than Putin has ever shown himself

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Book of George: A Novel
by Kate Greathead

(11/6/2024)

Greathead cleverly plays on the idea of the picaresque hero, a loveable rogue satirizing society's mores as he slips from one adventure to the next. George's picaresque adventures cut through some of the great social upheavals of the last two decades—Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the MeToo movement—but the novel's fast-paced episodes mean that too often these feel more like superficial waypoints through the 21st century than cultural moments worthy of true reflection. Greathead's strengt

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
by Olga Tokarczuk

(10/2/2024)

Like the body of Frau Opitz on the dining-room table, women are at the center of Tokarczuk's narrative without ever speaking a word. The Empusium features vanishingly few female characters, but their qualities and—more precisely—their defects are the obsession of the isolated male guests. As Wojnicz comes to realize, "every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women." To say too much

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Pink Slime

(8/21/2024)

The narrative bones of Pink Slime may be those of a straightforward family drama, but Trías enjoys wrapping them in some meaty experimentation. Like the eponymous pink paste, however, the philosophical musings and stylistic flair that pepper her writing are only somewhat nourishing. The novel may touch on all the weightiest contemporary concerns—environmental disaster, democratic backsliding, class inequality—but it's the knotty personal relationships that give it such a

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing

(7/17/2024)

Gardening is as much an intellectual endeavor for Laing as it is a physical one, and the roots of her thinking run deep. She makes room in this expansive book for figures ranging from the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon to Toni Morrison, but the greatest space is given over to micro-biographies of those who, like herself, have sought to plant paradise. Between vignettes from her own struggles, Laing introduces figures like John Clare, the 19th-century "peasant poet" who captured the nat

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Women and Children First: A Novel
by Alina Grabowski

(6/5/2024)

After Lucy Anderson falls to her death at a high school party, no one in Nashquitten, her gloomy, rain-battered hometown on the Massachusetts coast, seems to be quite sure what happened. Across ten chapters narrated by ten different female voices, Women and Children First draws a sharp portrait not so much of the ambitious, mercurial teenager—but of the community that let her slip away. The prose is biting, but although cynicism may be Grabowski's signature style, her writing is tha

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Clear: A Novel
by Carys Davies

(4/3/2024)

Ivar has lived alone for decades; the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that began a century earlier, have already forced his family from the land. But if Scottish history would have him for another victim, Clear deftly upends the usual narrative. Soon after arrival, John slips on the craggy coastline; Ivar, discovering his unconscious body, takes it upon himself to patch the minister up. An obsession with language drives this slim yet gripping novel. Ivar speaks Norn, an is