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God’s architects
The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain…
The invisible man
Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most…
The cowboy and the cop
Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…
A burnt-out case
Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t…
Cruelty and chaos
Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the…
Shades of meaning
This is a big book about a minor painting — a double portrait of John Bankes, aged about 16 (the…
Only revolution will do
After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is…
The art of the steal
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to…
Portrait of the artist as a young woman
One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2020, Raven Leilani’s debut comes acclaimed by a literary Who’s Who that includes…
In the land of the lemur
Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the…
Life and death decisions
Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard…
House of horrors
If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and…
Longing to belong
Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts,…
Blinded by Bismarck
The reviewer’s first duty is to declare any skin he may have in the game, so here goes: I write…
A river runs through it
‘Without this river the Russians could not live,’ remarked Robert Bremner in his work, Excursions in the Interior of Russia.…
Nature fights back
Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed…
A real wild child
Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the…
The value of suffering
A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible…
Dark and twisted
Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief…
Ancestral voices
Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the…
Easy pills to swallow
Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…
Flight from reality
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Rag-tag heroes
‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter…
Communicating in code
When Martin Puchner was a child, tramps would turn up at his family home in Nuremberg to be fed by…
When history is bunk
In the 1930s curators at the British Museum, under orders from Lord Duveen, a generous donor, scoured and hacked at…
