Book review – fiction

If you don’t think this novel is practically perfect, I’ll send you a replacement

4 October 2014 9:00 am

If there were a harvest festival to honour the bounty of the autumnal book crop, the choir would be in…

David Nicholls’ Us: Alan Partridge’s Grand Tour

4 October 2014 9:00 am

Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for…

This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…

Andrew Marr thinks he’s a novelist. I don’t

20 September 2014 9:00 am

It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming,…

A Troubles novel with plenty of violence and, thank heaven, some sex too

13 September 2014 9:00 am

‘The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying. . . . They will go without a struggle, unlamented,’ Christopher Bland, 76, declares…

It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…

Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece

13 September 2014 9:00 am

At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…

When Rachel Cusk went to Greece: would she be nice or nasty?

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly…

How on earth did David Mitchell's third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

6 September 2014 9:00 am

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999),…

Improbable, unconvincing and lazy - Ian McEwan’s latest is unforgivable

6 September 2014 9:00 am

The Children Act could hardly be more attuned to the temper of the times, appearing just as our newspapers are…

Ali Smith's How to be Both: warm, funny, subtle, intelligent – and baffling

30 August 2014 9:00 am

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

30 August 2014 9:00 am

Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…

Kafka goes to Dubai

30 August 2014 9:00 am

‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…

A novel that will make you want to call social services

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…

The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis's best for 25 years

16 August 2014 9:00 am

‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…

The hooligan and the psychopath

16 August 2014 9:00 am

A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s…

Soviet greyness, literary mediocrity and hot dates

9 August 2014 9:00 am

Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare…

Like Birdsong – only cheerful

2 August 2014 9:00 am

It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica…

Tip-toeing through Sri Lanka

26 July 2014 9:00 am

‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator…

A coming of age novel? Or an age of coming novel?

5 July 2014 9:00 am

At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon…

The soundtracked novel that won’t sit still

5 July 2014 9:00 am

The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each…

Maigret's new clothes – this month's best new crime novel, published 1931

28 June 2014 9:00 am

The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…

You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon

21 June 2014 9:00 am

Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…

Stephen King – return of the great storyteller

21 June 2014 8:00 am

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…

The man who loathed emoticons - especially :)) as it reminded him of his double chin

21 June 2014 8:00 am

Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky…