Fiction

Caught in a Venus flytrap: Red Pyramid, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Sorokin’s satirical stories are not for the fainthearted, but there are few more dedicated critics of Russia's infinite bureaucracy writing fiction today

A voyage of literary discovery: Clara Reads Proust, by Stéphane Carlier, reviewed

23 March 2024 9:00 am

A 23-year-old hairdresser casually picks up a copy of Swann’s Way left behind by a client – only to find the novel taking over her life

Boxing clever: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel, reviewed

23 March 2024 9:00 am

As eight teenage girls progress through a boxing championship in Reno, fighting is shown to be an undeniable, animal part of femininity in this knockout debut novel

Garbriel García Márquez has been ill-served by his sons

23 March 2024 9:00 am

Posthumously published against the author’s wishes, Until August should not detract from Marquez’s best work – but it would have been better left as a curiosity in the archives

Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed

16 March 2024 9:00 am

An Oxford undergraduate makes a detailed plan for getting the most out of a quiet Sunday in January, but soon starts musing on what it feels like to be distracted

The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed

16 March 2024 9:00 am

‘Don’t try to picture the apocalypse’, advises the novel’s unnamed zombie narrator. ‘Everything looks exactly the way you remembered it.’

A web of rivalries: The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, reviewed

16 March 2024 9:00 am

Eight translators gather to work on a novel written by their heroine, Irena Rey. But when she goes missing in a nearby forest, relations between them begin to fray

The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed

9 March 2024 9:00 am

Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes

The hellraisers of Hoxton: Art, by Peter Carty, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

The pretensions of the Young British Artists are lampooned in Carty’s debut novel – but there’s still something irresistible about the 1990s London it recreates

A free spirit: Clairmont, by Lesley McDowell, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Even by the Villa Diodati’s standards, Claire Clairmont was unconventional, seducing Byron when she was 18, and giving birth to their child after a possible affair with Shelley

Longing for oblivion: The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Arden’s novel spares us no details of trench warfare on the Western Front and the severely traumatised men dreaming of escape into amnesia

Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed

24 February 2024 9:00 am

In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life

Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed

24 February 2024 9:00 am

Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible

Reluctant servant of the Raj: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, reviewed

17 February 2024 9:00 am

Few personal details survive about Eric Blair’s life as a policeman in Burma, making his years in the East fertile ground for the novelist

Extremes of passion: What Will Survive of Us, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

10 February 2024 9:00 am

On first meeting, Sam and Lily both suffer a coup de foudre and embark on an affair involving submission and sado-masochism. But where will it lead?

Heartbreak in the workplace: Green Dot, by Madeleine Gray, reviewed

10 February 2024 9:00 am

Hera is 24, bisexual and usually dates women. But her infatuation with Arthur, an older, married journalist in her office, grows all-consuming

Progressives vs. bigots: How I Won a Nobel Prize, by Julius Taranto, reviewed

10 February 2024 9:00 am

When a quantum physicist and her partner reluctantly move to a university staffed by cancelled luminaries the scene is set for a darkly comic clash of ideologies

The perils of Prague: Parasol Against the Axe, by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed

10 February 2024 9:00 am

Three women with a criminal past meet for a weekend hen party – but any hopes of enjoying themselves are soon dashed

Escape into fantasy: My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, reviewed

27 January 2024 9:00 am

The 14-year-old daughter of a Dutch farmer is pursued by a paedophile vet and tries hard to combat the abuse by imagining she’s a bird

Secrets of the dorm: Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, reviewed

27 January 2024 9:00 am

An academic who also writes a column for a teen magazine eavesdrops on the conversations of rich university students and reproduces them for readers to sneer at

A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Set in the Appalachian Mountains, the novel centres around a family struggling to survive domestic abuse and abandonment in the aftermath of the American civil war

Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Marooned in Manhattan with a stoned student and precocious parrot for company, our elderly narrator despairs of the novel’s future when life is so much stranger than fiction

Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

The stories of two tragic mothers are interwoven in a haunting novel revolving around war, displacement, despair and the loss of children

Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

A lonely teenager on holiday in Italy befriends his grandparents’ elderly gardener and slowly coaxes out his painful memories of betrayals and reprisals during the war

Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed

13 January 2024 9:00 am

When Dan, his wife Isabel and her brother Robbie decide to spend lockdown together, claustrophobic domesticity develops into a painful love triangle