Book review – fiction
How really to annoy the neighbours: build a basement swimming-pool
This book has brought out my inner Miliband. A punitive mansion tax on all properties with garden squares in Notting…
A moving tribute to Janusz Korczak, hero of the Warsaw ghetto
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
Shunned, slighted and starving in Sheffield — the Indian immigrants who have become Britain’s untouchables
Novels of such scope and invention are all too rare; unusual, too, are those of real heart, whose characters you…
Milan Kundera’s fun-free festival
We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition,…
An Austenesque Aga saga with hints of postmodernism
Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored…
The dark side of Delhi
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
Queen Victoria was born to be a novelist — this book proves it
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
Owen Sheers disregards the first commandment of novel-writing: to show, not tell
This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key…
If a novel about failure fails, does that make it a success?
I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve…
Finders Keepers is not so much a book as a shot-by-shot description of a future film
Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled…
Fathers and sons — seen from multiple angles
‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t…
Elizabeth Day urges women to be more ‘me first’, less ‘no, no, after you’
Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the…
An epic journey (in Hobson-Jobsonese) through the first Opium War to the British seizure of Hong Kong
T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s…
An innocent abroad defies South Africa’s insane colour code
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: the war in Bosnia, a modern Irish council estate and the private life of Friedrich Engels
As all writers know to their cost, first novels are never really first novels. They make their appearance after countless…
A sombre Irish family saga — that glows in the dark
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
Turing, Snow White and the poisoned apple
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
Racism, paedophilia and an inverted Snow White
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
A lull in hostilities for Matthew Hervey
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not…
Social comedy Peruvian-style
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Brothels, hashish, a poisonous scorpion, a cursed necklace: all excuses for macho antics in the Valley of the Kings
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Murder on Grub Street
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Between town and country
‘I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion. I loathe the country and everything that relates to it… Ah l’étourdie! I…
Women go off the rails
The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman —…
The mysterious pleasure of Magnus Mills
Since his debut with the Booker-nominated The Restraint of Beasts in 1999, Magnus Mills has delighted and occasionally confounded his…
