Book review – fiction
The breasts that launched Les Fleurs du Mal
This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with…
Those weren't the days
If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do…
Not quite romantic fiction, or literary fiction, or commercial fiction – but still quite good
Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath…
The repression, anger and bloodshed of our own Game of Thrones
When I took up archery it was a relatively niche sport. Then Game of Thrones came along, and everyone wanted…
The best new 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…
If you prefer banal symbols freighted with meaning to plot, Nicola Barker is your woman
Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest…
How to survive the rain-sodden Welsh Marches
The Welsh Marches, gloriously unvisited amid their wooded hills and swift-flowing streams, have remained mysteriously off-limits to the sort of…
A Colder War, by Charles Cumming - review
The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…
A truth too tender for memoir
It has been 14 years since Akhil Sharma published his first, widely acclaimed novel, An Obedient Father. Though its subject…
No one would want to live in Jane Gardam's stories – but they're an amazing place to visit
In the world of Jane Gardam’s stories the past is always present, solid and often unwanted and always too big,…
Mid-life crisis, 13th-century style
The word delicate is seldom a compliment. I once threw a saucepan of hot soup out of a fifth storey…
An escape from New South Wales
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.…
A Mughal Disneyland and a ripping yarn
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
Start with a torpedo, and see where you go from there
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
A thriller that breaks down the publishing office door
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Don't let creative writing students read this book
One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way,…
A Beckett fagend rescued from a bin
Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Samuel Beckett walks into a nail bar
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
Caught between a New Age rock and a theory junkie hard place
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s…
The making of a novelist
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged…
Madness and massacre in the jungle
In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject…
Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably…
The spy who came in from le Carré
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August…
