Book review – fiction
LA runs riot
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
Angry, funny, timely
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
Poison and parsnip wine
First, a quote from the novel under review. The context: it is a flashback scene of the behaviour of a…
A bad novel on the way to a good one
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Between duty and desire
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
An American Wodehouse
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
Detroit’s new colonials
In the opening sentence of this subtle and finely poised novel, the narrator, Greg Marnier, known as ‘Marny’, admits that…
Recent crime fiction
The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept…
Sex, violence and lettuces
There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…
Social climbing through the basement
This book has brought out my inner Miliband. A punitive mansion tax on all properties with garden squares in Notting…
‘It’s always wrong to starve’
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
Dick Whittington for the 21st century
Novels of such scope and invention are all too rare; unusual, too, are those of real heart, whose characters you…
Style over substance
We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition,…
Sub-Aga saga
Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored…
The traffic in human misery
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
When we were very young
A wonderfully vivid school story has surfaced written by Queen Victoria as a child. The monarch was clearly a sensational novelist manqué, says Philip Hensher
Lost in the telling
This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key…
A triumphant failure
I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve…
Nasty piece of work
Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled…
In the name of the father
‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t…
Pursuing the perfect scoop
Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the…
God help me shippies!
T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s…
Hope against hope
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
A choice of first novels
As all writers know to their cost, first novels are never really first novels. They make their appearance after countless…
