Book review – fiction
Nine angst-ridden men
‘Insufficiency’ is a favourite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in…
When London burned like rotten sticks
Spectator readers know Andrew Taylor from his reviews of crime fiction. Many will also know him as an admirable writer…
The Sunlight Pilgrims: a chilling tale of the new Ice Age
Every second novel is fated to be measured against its predecessor; and that comparison is particularly hard when the debut…
Sex behind the scenes at Sofia’s National Palace of Culture
Garth Greenwell’s debut novel is as dreary and oppressive as the Soviet-era apartment buildings among which it takes place. But…
Riots and gang warfare provide the spark for the best latest thrillers
All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress…
Death and retribution in Beersheba
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist…
South Africa’s Heart of Darkness
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…
Hot Milk’s heroine has snaky curls and a basilisk stare
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen reminds me of Nabokov
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
How to Measure a Cow — and escape the shadows of the past
Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated,…
A Girl in Exile: Ismail Kadare’s novel is full of absence
My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts…
A senile Putin becomes a parody of his own parody
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…
Karl Ove Knausgaard describes nothing happening — wonderfully
It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…
First novel choice: the American connection
At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of…
Is China Miéville becoming a bit too inscrutable?
China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author…
Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
David Quantick’s The Mule: lost in the world of translation
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
A mother-son relationship that made me feel sick
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From…
Anthony Quinn’s Freya: an engaging costume drama
The name Freya is derived from the old Norse word for ‘spouse’, perhaps Odin’s. As a goddess she is variously…
Julie Myerson captures the sorrow that surpasses all understanding
As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…
Javier Marías's Thus Bad Begins: A touch of Vertigo in post-Franco Madrid
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
High drama on the high seas
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…
The watchers and the watched: Patrick Flanery's I Am No One
‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…
How not to tell a soldier’s story
Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties:…
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
