Book review – fiction
To the ends of the earth
What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing…
A tale of cloaks and daggers
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
Who was then the gentleman?
Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’…
Long nights of delicious horror
The thick of autumn is upon us, dear reader, and with it the shivers. Around Hallowe’en you may be tempted…
David Mitchell is in a genre of his own
David Mitchell’s new book, Slade House, is not quite a novel and not really a collection of short stories. It…
John Lennon’s desert island luxury
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…
Behind the scenes at the Brighton bombing
Sadly, I can’t see it catching on, but one of the notable things about Jonathan Lee’s new novel is that…
Curtain call for Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds…
The voice of Crow
A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to…
Complicated, but unfussy
Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory…
Sibling rivalries
In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country…
Ticks and crosses
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
A captivating prospect
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
Time out of mind
There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks…
A karaoke version of Kafka
The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland,…
Things left undead
In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a…
Universal appeal
As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a…
Quiet desperation
Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an…
Spirits of the Blitz
If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the…
First-rate firsts
It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure…
Gothic mysteries
This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are…
The lives of the artists — and other mysteries
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
Is no one having fun?
Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite…
