Book review – fiction
The net closes in
A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s…
A ladies’ man in Moscow
Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare…
Derring-do in Salonica
It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica…
Scars of Sri Lanka
‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator…
How to write a novel
At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon…
Life as an outsider
The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each…
Recent crime novels
The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…
Quiet, calm consideration…
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
Doubly unexpected
Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…
Teething troubles
Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky…
Amour fou
This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with…
Those were the days
If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do…
To the lighthouse
Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath…
The crimson petal and the white
When I took up archery it was a relatively niche sport. Then Game of Thrones came along, and everyone wanted…
A choice of children’s books
A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s…
Smiles and grimaces
Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest…
… and history in the Welsh Marches
The Welsh Marches, gloriously unvisited amid their wooded hills and swift-flowing streams, have remained mysteriously off-limits to the sort of…
Love and betrayal
The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…
His brother’s keeper
It has been 14 years since Akhil Sharma published his first, widely acclaimed novel, An Obedient Father. Though its subject…
Back to Blighty
In the world of Jane Gardam’s stories the past is always present, solid and often unwanted and always too big,…
Gently does it
The word delicate is seldom a compliment. I once threw a saucepan of hot soup out of a fifth storey…
Prisoners of conscience
Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from…
The gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau.…
Stirrings of mutiny
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
A lovable failure
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
