Second life: Playboy, by Constance Debré, reviewed
Having abandoned her marriage and her career as a lawyer, Debré re-emerges as a lesbian, a writer, and a seducer equal to Casanova
Learning the art lingo: the people, periods and -isms
An aspiring artist turned journalist, Bianca Bosker wheedles her way into the New York art scene – of gallerists, collectors, glamour and gossip
She’s leaving home: Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, reviewed
One ordinary November day in Dublin, without forethought or planning, a woman walks out on her husband and two teenage children and never comes back
A satire on the American art world: One Woman Show, by Christine Coulson, reviewed
Rich, pretty Kitty has been admired since childhood – but will the Park Avenue princess spend her entire life as a collectable object for connoisseurs?
Familiar and strange
Each story circles around events both big and small, such as lunch at a simple trattoria, a birthday party, a summer holiday or the funeral of a friend
Weird and bold
Laura Elkin looks at women artists from the past century onwards who boldly portray the female body from their own intimate experience
A mysterious kind of beauty
Too often dismissed as leaden or trivial, Dutch art is a ‘fathomless world, with a strangeness to arouse and disturb’, says Laura Cumming
Evil geniuses
Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer
I will survive
Separated from her husband, Constance trains herself to be ‘indestructible’ while awaiting a ruling over custody of their son
Tricks of the trade
Tony Tetro fooled many connoisseurs with his canvases – aged by mixing coffee and cigarette butts or baking them in a pizza oven
Making waves
Lily Le Brun explores our shifting relationship with the shoreline through works by Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Bridget Riley and other modernists
A complicated bond
When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising…
Firmly in the picture
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…
Messy family business
Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings. It’s spring 1855, and on the battlefields of the Crimea…
One day in Dublin
Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.…
The lady vanishes
How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown…
Waters of forgetfulness
Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender…
A slippery slope
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
City of dreams
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
On the edge
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
The scholar and the gypsy
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
Longing to belong
Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts,…
Born in the saddle
The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah…
What sort of family is this?
The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence,…
