Book review – fiction
Something scary in the attic
How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but…
That’s no lady
Did I enjoy this novel? Yes! Nevertheless, it dismayed me. How could John Banville, whom I’ve admired so much ever…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
The man who disappeared
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…
In Woolf’s clothing
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…
The search for meaning
He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first…
Torn between envy and contempt
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…
No pain, no gain
It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed…
A choice of first novels
Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…
The evil that men do
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
Wise women in wikuoms
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
Looking for treasure island
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
There’s no escape
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection…
Lost in a time capsule
On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants…
Last laughs
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
Recent children’s books
Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz,…
The cryonics game
Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and…
