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Conning the booktrade connoisseurs
Fuelled by loathing and resentment, Thomas James Wise set about defrauding as many privileged bibliophiles as he could – only to be rumbled by two of their number
You are what you don’t eat
In the past, the ability to preserve food depended largely on people’s means, making Eleanor Barnett’s history of food waste also a history of changing attitudes to poverty
The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed
‘Don’t try to picture the apocalypse’, advises the novel’s unnamed zombie narrator. ‘Everything looks exactly the way you remembered it.’
The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical
Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources
A web of rivalries: The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, reviewed
Eight translators gather to work on a novel written by their heroine, Irena Rey. But when she goes missing in a nearby forest, relations between them begin to fray
Dinosaurs, dogma and the Victorian mind
The ‘monsters’ dug from the cliffs of Lyme Regis did not sit well with the literal reading of Genesis – but many other issues contributed to the famed Victorian crisis of faith
The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed
Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes
The lonely passions of Carson McCullers
McCullers’s acclaimed first novel, written when she was 23, drew her into the orbit of several female writers with whom she fell in love – but it was never reciprocated for long
The many Jesus-like figures of the ancient world
Early Christianity positively welcomed comparisons between Jesus and Socrates, Asclepius, Emperor Vespasian and Apollonius of Tyana, according to Catherine Nixey
The fresh, forceful voice of Frantz Fanon
The Marxist from Martinique became a rallying figure for anti-colonial movements across the world. But might he have revised his violent message had he lived longer?
An unenviable mission: Clear, by Carys Davies, reviewed
It is 1843, the year of the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, and an impoverished minister is being paid to clear a lonely North Sea island of any remaining inhabitants
The hellraisers of Hoxton: Art, by Peter Carty, reviewed
The pretensions of the Young British Artists are lampooned in Carty’s debut novel – but there’s still something irresistible about the 1990s London it recreates
A war reporter bravely faces death – but not from sniper fire
As a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Rod Nordland learned to expect many dangers, but a brain tumour wasn’t one of them
A free spirit: Clairmont, by Lesley McDowell, reviewed
Even by the Villa Diodati’s standards, Claire Clairmont was unconventional, seducing Byron when she was 18, and giving birth to their child after a possible affair with Shelley
All work and no play is dulling our senses
Ancient Greek philosophers reckoned that life was all about free time, but 16th-century puritanism dealt a blow to the old festive culture from which we’ve never fully recovered
What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?
Alice Roberts’s examinations of violent deaths in the past take her to the site of Becket’s murder in Canterbury cathedral and the later destruction of his shrine by Henry VIII
Longing for oblivion: The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, reviewed
Arden’s novel spares us no details of trench warfare on the Western Front and the severely traumatised men dreaming of escape into amnesia
An Oxford spy ring is finally uncovered
Charles Beaumont’s warped group, recruited by an eccentric fellow of Jesus College, seems all too plausible. Other thrillers from Celia Walden and Matthew Blake
The remarkable Princess Gulbadan, flower of the Mughal court
Emperor Babur’s beloved daughter – whose name means ‘body like a rose’ – speaks to us across the centuries in a cliffhanging account of royal life in Hindustan
Do we really want to bring back the wolf?
The apex predator is making a startling resurgence in Europe – many say to the enrichment of the landscape. But it’ll take a lot to convince the British of that
The complexities of our colonial legacy
Weighing the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ effects of British imperialism is a futile exercise, says Sathnam Sanghera. But he comes perilously close to doing just that
Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed
In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life
Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed
Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible
The English were never an overtly religious lot
Undeterred, Peter Ackroyd takes us on a breezy tour of the nation’s religious history, from the Venerable Bede to the present
The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages
Samantha Ellis 9 March 2024 9:00 am
Ross Perlin is determined to support the ‘last speakers’ of endangered tongues, such as Seke. But if these speakers really are the last, they are not, in any real sense, speaking