Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed
Vuong’s disparate characters in rural Connecticut, including a Lithuanian octogenarian and her teenage Vietnamese carer, find fulfilment not in achievements but in loving companionship
A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed
Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother
A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed
The story of the disappearance from an Essex manor house of a Romanian astronomer named Maria Vaduva starts to obsess a local journalist a century later
Quiet brilliance
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting
A saint on the move
St Cuthbert’s body, rescued from the ‘devilish Danes’, is carried for hundreds of years to its eventual shrine in Durham cathedral
How to build a monastery
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
Memory test
On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer…
From Sooki to Snoopy
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing…
Mothers and daughters
A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use…
Dublin pub crawl
Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s…
A fog of forgetfulness
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
Descent into lawlessness
It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since…
How far can you go?
Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure,…
Lusting after Bathsheba: Lux, by Elizabeth Cook, reviewed
The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or…
Too much American angst: the latest short stories reviewed
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M.…
Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?
Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box…
My First Love
I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was…
Loss, grief and guilt
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
