Book review – fiction
Booked for murder
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Jokes? Prayers? Fables?
One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way,…
The fag-end rescued from the 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…
The sound of nervous laughter
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
The mask of truth
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s…
In deep water
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged…
Lambs to the slaughter
In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject…
Setting Kerouac on the road
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably…
The corpse in the cupboard
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August…
Damaged love
Any new book by Lorrie Moore is a cause for rejoicing, but her first collection of short stories for 16…
A later beginner
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
Flirting with magic realism
A preview of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issue in April last…
After the funeral
I first mistook David Gilbert’s second novel for the sort of corduroy-sleeved family saga at which American writers excel. The…
A choice of first novels
The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and…
Corpses and clichés
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
Portrait of a marriage
In Never Mind Miss Fox, Olivia Glazebrook’s second novel, the revelation of a long buried secret releases a Pandora’s Box…
Love in a Cold War climate
Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew…
Georgian romp
London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young…
His soul goes marching on
James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is set in the mid 19th century, and is based on the real life…
Write what you know
Adam Foulds’s latest novel is less successful than its predecessor. In 2009 he reached the Booker shortlist with The Quickening…
Too sharp by half
It is six years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel Something to Tell You, a kaleidoscopic meditation on life and death…
Into the valley of death
John Williams’s brilliant 1965 novel, Stoner, was republished last year by Vintage to just, if surprisingly widespread, acclaim and went…
A comedy of manners
This utterly charming, totally bonkers short novel is something from another age. There are elements of A Handful of Dust…
The food of love
The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the…
