Fiction
Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
Isolating with the ex
Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…
A deadly vacuum
Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…
Man of many parts
William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the…
A complicated bond
When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising…
An empire crumbles
Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this…
Only one half of the story
As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as…
For the chop
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi,…
Back on the road again
Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you…
Mad men plotting
Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother,…
The mutterings of the dead
Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set…
A bold departure
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is unusually long and autobiographical. It’s surprising in other ways, too, says Claire Lowdon
The curse of Medusa
Natalie Haynes has been compared with Mary Renault, the historical novelist who scandalised readers in the 1950s with her unflinching…
Bittersweet memories
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
Second chances
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
Wall Street madness
‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too…
Communing with the dead
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
Nazi on the run
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
Foul play in Ferrara
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Perturbed spirit
Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The…
Adrift in Berlin
Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…
A shaggy drug story
The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…
Seize the moment
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…
Men under fire
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
