allegory
An avian allegory: Dinosaurs, by Lydia Millet, reviewed
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim,…
A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease
Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you…
Hideously watchable: Killing of a Sacred Deer reviewed
You know where you aren’t with director Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek allegorist creates parallel worlds which superficially resemble our own.…
I became a Conservative thanks to a little winged rabbit called Pookie
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…
Village life can be gripping
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
