Book review – fiction
The Great Gatsby meets Fifty Shades of Oligarch
It’s surprising there haven’t been more novels drawing on London’s fascination with Russian oligarchs. But how to write about them…
Murder in a black Texas Arcadia
Mystery fans and writers are always looking for new locations in which murder can take place. Attica Locke has an…
Taxi ride to the dark side: a thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees…
Ebola personified: a cackling villain with a master plan of destruction
Remember Ebola? It killed more than 8,000 people last year — before we were all Charlie — with a quarter…
The secret life of the short story
The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of…
Melissa Kite comes out fighting. Again
Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing…
Brian Sewell does some donkey work: how Britain’s best-known art critic put his ass on the line
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…
Wolves in the Lake District get everyone’s pheromones going
Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt…
A lost American classic to rival anything by Faulkner
It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing…
A mad menage — and menagerie - in Mexico: the life of Leonora Carrington in fictional form
Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every…
Things fall apart in Denis Johnson’s latest novel of madness and anarchy in Sierra Leone
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one…
Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
Symbolism and a man called U: more avant-garde fiction from Tom McCarthy
In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction,…
British colonialism is once again under attack in Aatish Taseer’s sprawling Indian epic
Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of…
Monstrous, beautiful, damaged people make for tiresome company in Polly Samson’s The Kindness
Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a…
Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
Hock and partridge help fascism go down in 1930s London
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…
A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of…
When two young Britons go camping in Yosemite their lives are changed for ever
The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two…
Ogres, pixies, dragons, goblins... Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years is a strange beast indeed
If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon…
Michael Arditti is the Graham Greene of our time
Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s…
‘Another terrible thing...’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
Anne Tyler’s everyday passions
There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. None of them was famous. None of them could claim exceptional intelligence, and…
The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam
News of Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission caused such a stir that the book was pirated online before publication. David Sexton reports on the latest literary event in France
Time-travel, smugglers, arsenic — what’s not to like in Sally Gardner’s novel for teenagers?
Which of us, as an adolescent, did not experience at some point a terrible sense of not belonging? Which of…
