Book review – fiction
A box of squibs
Enough of big ideas and grand designs. Instead, here are 30 unusually small ideas from the giant pulsating brain of…
The burning issue of the age
Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding…
The latest horrific mutation
Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of…
Madness in the ghetto
There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts…
Who did fall at the Reichenbach Falls?
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their…
Resurrection men
Ghostly doings are afoot in Edwardian London. Choking fog rolls over the treacle- black Thames. Braziers cast eerie shadows in…
A jaunty romp of rape and pillage
The Brethren, by Robert Merle, who died at the age of 95 ten years ago, was originally published in 1977,…
One detective bows out…
Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was…
Back in the mean streets
Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that,…
Finding a new way to live
In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home…
Practically perfect in every way
If there were a harvest festival to honour the bounty of the autumnal book crop, the choir would be in…
Make or break
Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for…
An old classic in a new light
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
Marred entertainment
It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming,…
In time of Troubles
‘The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying. . . . They will go without a struggle, unlamented,’ Christopher Bland, 76, declares…
Doubting Thomas
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
He’s not joking
At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…
Sharp observation skills
Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly…
Pile-up on the reincarnation superhighway
Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999),…
Lost in transfusion
The Children Act could hardly be more attuned to the temper of the times, appearing just as our newspapers are…
What is going on?
Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a…
In love with the lodger
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…
X and his complexes
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…
The mother of all problems
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
Grappling with the impossible subject
‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…
