Book review – fiction
Tessa Hadley's masterful new novel of missed opportunities
In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country…
The perfect big bang that opens this book was too good to be true
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
A gleeful vision of the future from Margaret Atwood
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
Sebastian Faulks returns to the psychiatrist’s chair in Where My Heart Used to Beat
There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks…
If there’d been a Gilbert and Sullivan opera about Roland Barthes, it might have sounded like John Banville’s The Blue Guitar
The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland,…
The Making of Zombie Wars is Aleksandar Hemon at his hilarious best
In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a…
This way to a parallel universe, via north Oxford
As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a…
Introducing the silent narrator
Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an…
Ghosts of the past haunt Pat Barker’s bomb-strewn London
If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the…
Mario Reading reviews four first-rate first novels
It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure…
A Gothic horror story of quicksands, riptides and rituals
This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are…
A remote island community is disrupted by the arrival of a troubled teenager
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…
Jonathan Galassi’s fictional poet made me doubt my knowledge of American literature
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
An epic study of trauma and friendship in the age of self-invention
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
A novel to cure fear of missing out
Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite…
The gangs of LA are caught in an unending bloody vendetta
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
A broad farce about banking’s dirty secrets in post-Celtic-Tiger Dublin
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
A crime novel so incompetent it might have been written by a child
First, a quote from the novel under review. The context: it is a flashback scene of the behaviour of a…
Go Set a Watchman should never have been hyped as a ‘landmark new novel’, says Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
The Outsider — from the viewpoint of the victim’s family
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
The best Jeeves and Wooster novel Saul Bellow never wrote
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
Wrangles over the Rust Belt
In the opening sentence of this subtle and finely poised novel, the narrator, Greg Marnier, known as ‘Marny’, admits that…
From conspiracy to childhood secrets: a choice of recent crime fiction
The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept…
Seeds of a mystery in a great-aunt’s will
There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…
