Fiction
Gay abandon: Islands of Mercy, by Rose Tremain, reviewed
Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old…
Primal longing: Blue Ticket, by Sophie Macintosh, reviewed
Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s…
Forlorn Plorn: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, reviewed
Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué…
Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…
My dazzling chum: Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed
Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of…
A story without redemption: The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, reviewed
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…
Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
A rainy day in the Highlands: Summerwater, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of…
Who is telling the truth in Kate Reed Petty’s True Story?
This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…
A toast to brotherhood: Summer, by Ali Smith, reviewed
The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the…
Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
A tide of paranoid distrust: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison, reviewed
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
Poetic miniatures: A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo, reviewed
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Stockholm syndrome: The Family Clause, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, reviewed
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
False pretences: No-Signal Area, by Robert Perisic, reviewed
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
Dark secrets: The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, reviewed
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
The Sixties vibe: Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell, reviewed
There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in…
Spotting the mountweazels: The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams, reviewed
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
The attraction of repulsion: The Disaster Tourist, by Yun-Ko Eun, reviewed
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
A panoramic novel of modern Britain: The Blind Light, by Stuart Evers, reviewed
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…