Book review – fiction
All the pomp of family life
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
Turing’s long shadow
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
Snow White or black beauty?
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
A break from sabre-thrusting
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not…
A peephole into Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
A mingling of blood and ink
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
The nature of belonging
‘I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion. I loathe the country and everything that relates to it… Ah l’étourdie! I…
Sink or swim
The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman —…
Pure word music
Since his debut with the Booker-nominated The Restraint of Beasts in 1999, Magnus Mills has delighted and occasionally confounded his…
Made in Chelski
It’s surprising there haven’t been more novels drawing on London’s fascination with Russian oligarchs. But how to write about them…
Dangerously close to home
Mystery fans and writers are always looking for new locations in which murder can take place. Attica Locke has an…
Scabrous lyricism
Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees…
The mask of death
Remember Ebola? It killed more than 8,000 people last year — before we were all Charlie — with a quarter…
The decisive moment
The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of…
For the sake of argument
Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing…
The ass saw the angel
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…
Fifty shades of grey wolf
Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt…
Into the valley of death
It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing…
The true flower of dawn
Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every…
Dark humour for the dark continent
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one…
Arch absurdity
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
The symbolism of slashed jeans
In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction,…
An Indian family epic
Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of…
Paradise lost
Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a…
