An unconventional orphan: Queen Esther, by John Irving, reviewed
At the heart of this vast, sweeping novel is a solitary, determined heroine, who – Jane Eyre-like – is a moral force unbound by conventionalities
Sebastian Faulks looks back on youth and lost idealism
The novelist describes key moments in his life from boarding school onwards in essays originally intended to discuss ‘the things that have meant the most to me’
Lives upended: TonyInterruptor, by Nicola Barker, reviewed
At an improvised jazz performance a man interrupts a trumpet solo asking: ‘Is this honest?’ The incident goes viral, prompting much comic argument about abstractions
The benign republic of Julian Barnes
The novelist presents his utopia – of unilateral disarmament and the public ownership of transport – in the tone of a thoughtful vicar giving an anodyne sermon somewhere in the Home Counties
The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed
Our magnificently monstrous anti-hero goes in quest of a cache of reputedly pornographic letters written by the former US president to his mistress
The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York
Vivian Gornick’s memoir of life in the city in the 1960s and 1970s is rich in anecdote and dialogues with waspish friends and neighbours
The contagions of the modern world
Disturbing trends in American healthcare, higher education, opioid use and crime come under scrutiny in Malcolm Gladwell’s sequel to The Tipping Point
Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed
Kafka, spitting blood, escapes Prague to join his sister in Bohemia, and a fictional lover flees the wrath of an outraged husband in Josipovici’s delightful two-in-one trick
Shalom Auslander vents his disgust – on his ‘grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious self’
Long derided as ‘feh’ by his Orthodox parents, the American writer admits to being his own hanging judge
The wry humour of Franz Kafka
A masterly new translation of his Diaries reminds us that Kafka wasn’t solely the prophet of a century of dehumanisation
Music was always Anthony Burgess’s first love
A gifted pianist and composer, Burgess combined his talents in a superb series of music reviews, published for the first time in a complete collection
Dark days in Wales: Of Talons and Teeth, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a mountain is being hollowed out for mining, and everyone is covered in mud or worse in this memorable and highly original novel
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
What happened in Berlin?
How it all began: Di Taverner, Service legend David Cartwright and the rest of the Slow Horses make themselves known to the reader in an origin story disguised as a follow-up
Spiral of despair
John Niven had to fight hard to discover why his suicidal brother was left alone and unmonitored in an Ayrshire hospital, with fatal consequences
A born storyteller
Instead of swashbuckling, we get the Parisian art world, trout-fishing, unhappy couples and surrogate parenting – though the 20 stories for children are full of adventure
Advice to struggling writers
Broad in scope and beautifully written, this unconventional autobiography contains some of the best advice struggling writers will ever receive
Judge, jury and executioner
‘Immediate Justice’, the government’s new policing initiative of pursuing petty criminals, reflects the black-clad law-enforcer’s 1970s methods exactly
Pursued by demons
After his mother’s murder, the teenage Ellroy seemed lost to speed and alcohol – until his discovery of crime writing led to a different addiction
Life with Mother
The flamboyant hostess and ‘psychic’ interior decorator does seem like a comic creation – but she was real enough, and perhaps madder than Ludwig Bemelmans lets on
Surprise! Surprise!
For centuries, grammarians considered it vulgar and warned against using it too freely – but Jane Austen saw the point of it, says Florence Hazrat
Getaway cars
How to beat London’s Ulez charge
The mutterings of the dead
Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set…
How far could he go?
I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…
The Everybody Inn
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
