Alex Preston

A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed

28 January 2023 9:00 am

A group of privileged teenagers at Buckley School, Los Angeles medicate themselves on champagne, cocaine and mindless sex – until something awful happens

Knotty problems: French Braid, by Anne Tyler, reviewed

19 March 2022 9:00 am

Anne Tyler’s 24th novel French Braid opens in 2010 in Philadelphia train station. We find the teenage Serena, who has…

Sowing seeds of comfort

10 April 2021 9:00 am

If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…

Bright and beautiful: Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn, reviewed

13 March 2021 9:00 am

Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject…

A panoramic novel of modern Britain: The Blind Light, by Stuart Evers, reviewed

27 June 2020 9:00 am

A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…

If you haven’t read Louise Erdrich, now’s the time to start: The Night Watchman reviewed

14 March 2020 9:00 am

Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa when the US Congress imposed…

Moon walks with the Romantic poets

1 June 2019 9:00 am

Several years ago, I was interviewing the garden writer and designer Sarah Raven at her home in Sussex when a…

Novel number 8: has Dave Eggers finally found his voice?

Has Dave Eggers finally found his voice?

16 March 2019 9:00 am

The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down…

An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed

9 February 2019 9:00 am

‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…

Alexander Chee. Credit Bloomsbury Publishing

Does an autobiographical novel really count as fiction?

17 November 2018 9:00 am

Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer…

Pithy and profound: the beauty of aphorisms

13 October 2018 9:00 am

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to…

A hedge-fund protagonist – Gary Shteyngart takes aim in Lake Success

29 September 2018 9:00 am

‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured…