Lacrimae rerum: That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, reviewed
Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners,…
As intricate as an origami sculpture: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow reviewed
Steampunk, a shapeshifting and unpredictable genre, has a way of subverting the past, mischievously disordering the universe with historical what-ifs.…
Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
A Mojave desert mystery: The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, reviewed
Late one night, on a dimly lit stretch of highway in a small town in the Californian Mojave desert, an…
A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…
Secrets and lies: Berta Isla, by Javier Marías, reviewed
A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most…
Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house…
Portrait of an American childhood: A Long Island Story by Rick Gekoski reviewed
Success as a rare books dealer, academic, publisher, broadcaster and author of several non-fiction books — at 70, Rick Gekoski…
A single mother hits rock bottom in Tokyo: Territory of Light reviewed
Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the…
Naples drowns in deluge and corruption
There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s…
Octopus beaks and snake soup
Driving across Japan’s Shikuko island, the food and travel writer Michael Booth pulls into a filling station to find, alongside…
Chaos among the commodes in Nina Stibbe’s old folks’ home
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
Losers in the game of life
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…
Javier Marías's Thus Bad Begins: A touch of Vertigo in post-Franco Madrid
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
Jhumpa Lahiri's new tongue
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
John Lennon’s desert island luxury
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
Social comedy Peruvian-style
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Women in the various hells of Algiers
On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway…
A novel that will make you want to call social services
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
A lost treasure of Japanese fiction – pocket-sized but world class
Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in…
Who’s raiding the fridge?
There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…
