Book review – fiction
A leap in the dark
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
An innocent abroad
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
About a boy
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From…
A disarming heroine
The name Freya is derived from the old Norse word for ‘spouse’, perhaps Odin’s. As a goddess she is variously…
A host of unquiet spirits
As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…
Vile deeds and voyeurism
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
Two men in a boat
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…
Life in a glass house
‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…
One man’s war through 45 objects
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,…
One fine spring day
The opening of Graham Swift’s new novel clearly signals his intent. ‘Once upon a time’ tells us that this will…
A plague on all P-words
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
Stop calling me ‘Goat’
The title of Tim Parks’s 17th novel is false advertising, because Thomas and Mary: A Love Story is barely a…
The trouble with mothers
For a child, the idea of ‘knowing’ your mother doesn’t compute; she’s merely there. As an adult, there may be…
A pitiful wreck
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
One holy mess
This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons. The comments on…
Revolution now and then
Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of…
Laughter and tears
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in…
Cold comfort for Gibbons fans
One of the great fascinations of a ‘lost’ work by a famous name dredged up out of the vault after…
Staying put
Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make…
A lonely ice maiden
‘Mystery comes through clarity’, is how Rupert Thomson recently described the effect he was trying to achieve in writing. It’s…
Erica Jong’s middle-aged dread
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only…
August in Arizona
Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with…
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
Too much gush
The cover of Edna O’Brien’s 17th novel sports a handsome quote from Philip Roth: ‘The great Edna O’Brien has written…
