Fiction
The twists keep coming
Murray’s immersive, beautifully written mega-tome about a family in a small town in Ireland is as funny as it is deeply disturbing
Chance encounters
The fates of members of a Jewish family depend on accidental meetings, the boarding of a ship or the ring of a phone in this complex fable woven from 20th-century history
An unstable world
Adapted from interviews with a trainer from Iowa, Scanlan’s novel is a disturbing portrait of violence and squalor behind the scenes at racing stables
Double trouble
Elsa, a concert pianist, is starting to panic. Her adoptive father is dying, and she keeps meeting her doppleganger, fuelling an obsession with her origins
A troubling Eden
Scandal engulfs a female rector when her chief bellringer is accused of child-molesting and paintings in the parish church are judged sacrilegious
Literary charades
Blending fact and fiction, France combines a tale of antics on a creative writing course with episodes from her family life
Was it murder?
In a beautifully told novel, O’Callaghan focuses on the mysterious death of the footballer Matthias Sindelar in 1939 – possibly as a result of defying Hitler
An eye for the absurd
Come for the satire, stay for the one-liners, and take succour from the hope Walter finds in a world where everyone needs an angel from time to time
The view from on high
Sixteen-year-old Kit floats free from her body at night and circles invisibly over family and friends – not always liking what she sees
A nasty piece of work
Moving among the rich of Long Island, an upmarket prostitute grows increasingly desperate as her many misdemeanours are exposed
The horrors of lynching
Percival Everett’s 22nd novel The Trees was that rare thing on this year’s Booker shortlist: a genre novel. Only which…
The give and take of friendship
Claudia FitzHerbert explores the complex bond between two remarkable writers in the interwar years
The less said the better
Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in…
Mitfordian mischief
It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…
Among hawks and doves
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim,…
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,…
