Some novels are aptly named – Distortion is one of them
Coming 12 years after his acclaimed debut, Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s second novel Distortion features a vivid argot, complicating and defamiliarising…
Playing for time
In a pleasing nod to Marcel Proust, Eustace, the middle-aged protagonist of Patrick Gale’s new novel, is propelled into memories…
From the Iliad to the IRA: Country, by Michael Hughes, reviewed
Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the…
America’s wittiest women fight to be taken seriously
From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to…
The murderer who got away – and the woman who died in pursuit
This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker…
Has Paul Theroux finally lost it?
As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I…
Something scary in the attic
How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but…
A bleak future — without cabbages or kings
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
A broad farce about banking’s dirty secrets in post-Celtic-Tiger Dublin
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
