More from Books
Where the soul sits alone
If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…
Strategies for survival
Late in his life, I asked my uncle René about his exploits in wartime France. What I knew was that…
Mad, bad and dangerous
Brian De Palma brings his film director’s eye to Are Snakes Necessary? (Hard Case, £16.99), written in collaboration with the…
Straight to number one
Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve…
The show that bombed
‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then…
An age-old problem
‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…
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…
James Bond and Q in one
Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…
Things that go bump in the night
This is a paranormal book — by which I mean it exists in a truly out of the ordinary netherworld…
Mysteries multiply
Steampunk, a shapeshifting and unpredictable genre, has a way of subverting the past, mischievously disordering the universe with historical what-ifs.…
A woman of no importance
‘Buy pink baby clothes,’Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this bestselling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s surgery. Jiyoung’s…
Plumbing the depths
Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt…
The worm in the bud
The Mediterranean-centred era spanning a century or so either side of 1492 is filled to the brim with stories. There…
A thousand and one nightmares
The Moroccan-born Leïla Slimani has made her name writing novels of propulsive intensity. Lullaby, the story of a nanny who…
Grandfather’s story
Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa when the US Congress imposed…
The courage of their convictions
Historians argue endlessly and pointlessly about the extent to which the human factor rather than brute circumstance determines the course…
A story of low self-esteem
Short, fat and shy, the protagonist of Adam Mars-Jones’s latest novel doesn’t have much going for him; even his name…
Escape into music
Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As…
Apple of discord
Forty-seven years ago, Virago paperbacks, with their stylish green spines and hint-of-the-transgressive colophons of a red apple with a bite…
The purity myth
In the award-winning musical Avenue Q, filthy-minded puppets sang about schadenfreude, internet porn, loud sex, the uselessness of an English…
First novels: The children’s hour
Kiley Reid’s Philadelphia-set debut, Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a satire on white saviour syndrome, woke culture and…
No stone unturned
Andrew Ziminski is the man who rebuilt the West Country. For 30 years, this skilled stonemason has renovated some of…
Tales out of school
‘James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel,’ says Hilary Mantel on the cover of English Monsters, which,…
Mathematical mysteries
The reality (or lack thereof) of numbers is the kind of problem some philosophers consider overwhelmingly important, but it’s of…
In his own sweet way
On 8 November 1954, Dave Brubeck’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, accompanied by the words ‘The Joints…
