Between 2018 and 2020, longform reviews of recent literature appeared regularly on the Splice website. As ever, our focus was on new works of fiction and literary non-fiction, as well as literature in English translation, usually published by small and independent presses in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as Covid lockdowns and restrictions caused upheavals for book publication schedules and release dates, our reviews went onto hiatus and we haven’t (yet) revived them. But our editorial aim with these reviews wasn’t simply to allow reviews to produce an ephemeral take on this or that new book. We always pushed our reviews to look closer at the text, to read more carefully, to articulate their views with greater detail and nuance — and to do so at greater length, if need be — to invest their work with value that would survive the lapsing of its immediate relevance to literary culture. For that reason, we maintain this archive of past reviews and we hope to be able to commission more of them at some point in the future.