A death foretold: The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker, reviewed
Cassandra prophesies Agamemnon’s death as punishment for his crimes in Troy. But she knows that she too must share his fate -- since ‘you can’t cherry-pick prophecy’
Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed
In an alternative universe where the Mental Parity Movement holds sway, the ignorant and unqualified are deemed ‘just as good as anyone else’ – with predictable results
Bribery and betrayal
The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is portrayed as a Vicar of Bray figure, all too ready to change allegiances in one of the most volatile periods of English history
Frederic Raphael settles old scores with a vengeance
The nonagenarian’s critical faculties are as sharp as ever in these imaginary letters addressed to Kingsley Amis, Jonathan Miller, Doris Lessing and many others
A.N. Wilson has many regrets
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
Nazi on the run: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, by Olivier Guez, reviewed
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
Connecticut connections: A Little Hope, by Ethan Joella, reviewed
A Little Hope, Ethan Joella’s debut novel, is about the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people who live…
A visit from Neanderthals: The Red Children, by Maggie Gee, reviewed
This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem…
Culture clash: Things We Don’t Tell the People We Love, by Huma Qureshi, reviewed
Apart from what the title tells us, these stories are about a fundamental difference in cultures. Huma Qureshi writes like…
In search of Great-Aunt Pearl’s will: a black comedy of familial strife
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
On the cowboy’s trail: Powder Smoke, by Andrew Martin, reviewed
Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…
Appearances are deceptive: Trio, by William Boyd, reviewed
Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives…
A Wiltshire mystery: A Saint in Swindon, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled,…
Desperate to preserve her sister Jane’s reputation, Cassandra Austen lost her own
Poor Cassy. The Miss Austen of this novel’s title is Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister. She was to have married Thomas…
Angel or demon? The Carer, by Deborah Moggach, reviewed
You might think The Carer rather an unpromising title, but Deborah Moggach’s book delivers a wickedly witty entertainment. Towards the…
London after the Great Fire: The King’s Evil, by Andrew Taylor, reviewed
The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless…
One of the world’s great love stories
‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about…
Chains and planes: Turbulence, by David Szalay, reviewed
In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill,…
A paean to lesbian love: Aftershocks, by A.N. Wilson, reviewed
The polymath writer A.N.Wilson returns to the novel in Aftershocks, working on the template of the 2011 earthquake which devastated…
Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield
Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar…
Down’s syndrome and dystopia in Jesse Bull’s Census
Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
Prophesying doom
Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist…
Double trouble
Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after…
