An excellent spy: Cold Sunset, by William Boyd, reviewed
Tasked with exfiltrating a secret agent from Moscow, Gabriel Dax shows himself as competent as ever: good at following people, good at laying traps and good at shooting to kill
The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann
The German writer recalls her grandmother’s collection of voodoo dolls and her father’s surreal invention of a stunted lodger living in the suspended ceiling
The agonies of adolescence: The Party, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed
In post-war Bristol, two sisters fall in with a group of arrogant young men and soon feel themselves painfully inferior
My summer of love with God’s gift
Studying in Russia in 1994, Viv Groskop falls in love with a Ukrainian rock guitarist named Bogdan Bogdanovich and accompanies him on a visit home
Wasting away
Aged 14, Hadley Freeman succumbed to it, and was offered many conflicting explanations. She herself finally attributes it to a fear of approaching womanhood
The trapdoor opens
In a powerful and ultimately heartening memoir, the Oxford professor describes being trapped in a mutinous body, and what it does to the spirit
A kingdom of the mind
When an Irish shipbuilder’s son was crowned king of a Caribbean rock in 1880, few would have guessed how long this eccentric monarchy would last
An immorality tale
Has there been a better novel this century than Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation? There might not…
The dear departed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
Author’s notebook
To my surprise, what I miss most about life before the lockdown are parties. As others pine for restaurants and…
Under his skin
Bill Bryson on writing, loss and the wonders of the human body
