CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Wood Festival, Braziers Park Oxfordshire
Small but perfectly formed world music event punches well above its weight
Kora virtuoso: Jali-Fily Cissokho
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
WOOD festival, now in its 11th year, is a modest and family-friendly festival held in the beautiful grounds of Braziers Park in Oxfordshire.
Legend has it that brothers Joe and Robin Bennett, founders of the indie-rock extravaganza Truck Festival, launched Wood once they and their friends started having kids and wanted a means of initiating their young into festival culture in a less ear-piercing way.
So Wood has remained small-scale, with plenty of children’s activities and a blend of music — largely folk and Americana — reaching out across the generations.
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