Fiction
Bombs over Belfast
Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks…
A controlling monster
If vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families stuffed with passive aggression and seething resentment are your thing, you will…
Knotty problems
Anne Tyler’s 24th novel French Braid opens in 2010 in Philadelphia train station. We find the teenage Serena, who has…
The making of a murderer
Were it not for an event on the night of 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth would be remembered, if…
A magical epic
When the first volume of Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy appeared in 2019, it was quickly recognised as a masterly…
The making of a poet
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
A troubled past
Andrew Miller specialises in characters who are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure. They don’t come…
Waters of forgetfulness
Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender…
Ways of escape
The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative…
Dreaming of escape
‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this…
Once upon a time in the South
To write a first novel of 800 pages is either supremely confident or crazy. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of…
Mirror of distortion
Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the…
Sly and saucy
At last, and finally: literary sex is back. The Bad Sex Prize has a lot to answer for in British…
Hopes and fears
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
Smoking muskets and flashing daggers
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
We were warned
Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in…
Shades of the prison house
For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary…
GHB and GBH
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…
Looking on the bright side
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a…
Into the woods
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the…
Confused lives
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Magical mystery tour
At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon.…
Dirty secrets
Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world…
A late awakening
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
