Book review – fiction
Pride, prejudice, celebrity…
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short…
One day, two lonely people
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Nothing quite adds up
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
The American dream goes bust
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
All is not lost
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
Crossing continents
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…
The horse from hell
There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other…
When in Rome…
‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…
More blood and tears
Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel Train-spotting flicked a hearty V-sign in the face of alarm-clock Britain. ‘Ah choose no tae…
The last word
Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had…
Nine angst-ridden men
‘Insufficiency’ is a favourite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in…
London’s burning
Spectator readers know Andrew Taylor from his reviews of crime fiction. Many will also know him as an admirable writer…
The iceberg cometh
Every second novel is fated to be measured against its predecessor; and that comparison is particularly hard when the debut…
Obscure object of desire
Garth Greenwell’s debut novel is as dreary and oppressive as the Soviet-era apartment buildings among which it takes place. But…
Recent crime fiction
All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress…
Hostage to misfortune
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist…
Lost in translation
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…
A mix of myths
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
Disgusted of X-ville
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
Neighbours and strangers
Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated,…
Sins of omission
My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts…
Bribes, bickering and backhanders
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…
Wonderful waffle
It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…
A choice of first novels
At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of…
Foreign body count
China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author…
