Book review – fiction
Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed
Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed
Everything blends into everything else as an Aboriginal knight errant sets out on a quest to save his scorched native bushlands
A bird’s-eye view: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, reviewed
Six astronauts at the International Space Station observe the ravages on Mother Earth, but remain hopeful that mankind will find another parent planet
Something in the air: Broken Ghost, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of a rave on the shores of a mountain lake above Aberystwyth, with three…
A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same…
Capers in crime: Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, reviewed
Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and…
A picture of rural Kentucky: Stand by Me, by Wendell Berry, reviewed
Anyone picking up a book by Wendell Berry, whether it be fiction, essays or a collection of his lucid and…
America’s brutal borstals: The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed
Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a…
Fun and games: I Am Sovereign, by Nicola Barker, reviewed
In 2017’s Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker strewed pages with multicoloured text. The Cauliflower, her joyful previous offering, employed…
Angel or demon? The Carer, by Deborah Moggach, reviewed
You might think The Carer rather an unpromising title, but Deborah Moggach’s book delivers a wickedly witty entertainment. Towards the…
Desperate souls: Travellers, by Helon Habila, reviewed
Death by water haunts the stories of Africans in Europe that flow through this fourth novel by Helon Habila. From…
A drag army in waiting: This Brutal House, by Niven Govinden, reviewed
Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House is set in the demi-monde of the New York vogue ball. This is an organised,…
Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
Murder in the basement: The Language of Birds, by Jill Dawson, reviewed
Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the…
Writing as revenge: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, reviewed
Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as…
Hitting the bull’s-eye: Hark, by Sam Lipsyte, reviewed
This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt…
Fun at the EU’s expense: The Capital, by Robert Menasse, reviewed
Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of…
Kristen Roupenian’s debut short stories fulfil all expectations
Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went…
The Australian James Joyce: the novels of Gerald Murnane reviewed
Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or…
Where would we be without crime’s heavies? Muscle, by Alan Trotter, reviewed
Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would…
Bertie takes on the Black Shorts: Jeeves and the King of Clubs, by Ben Schott, reviewed
In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a…
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Heredity is only half the story
The Romans invoked Fortuna, the goddess of luck, to explain the unexplainable; fortune-tellers study tea leaves to predict the unpredictable.…
The road trip from hell: A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
A lingeringly strange atmosphere hangs about Benjamin Wood’s third novel, in which the settings and paraphernalia of a new wave…
A friendship in flux: Normal People, by Sally Rooney, reviewed
‘Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t…
