Fiction
Travels in time and space
It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…
The slow horses gather pace
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
Glaswegian waif
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize,…
Messy family business
Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings. It’s spring 1855, and on the battlefields of the Crimea…
Moonlit escapades
The Perfect Golden Circle is ostensibly about male friendship. Two men, flotsam of the 1980s – Calvert, a Falklands veteran,…
A visit from Neanderthals
This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem…
Life in the Afterworld
Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of…
One day in Dublin
Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.…
Boy wonder
During his brief stage career Master Betty, or the Young Roscius, was no stranger to superlatives: genius, unparalleled, superior, Albion’s…
Memory test
On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer…
The great divide
Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning recent film Belfast chronicles the travails of a Protestant family amid sectarian conflict in 1969. Louise Kennedy’s…
Staring back at Suzon
In this arresting debut novel we follow 26-year-old Eve as she tries to come to terms with the loss of…
Who’s story is it?
‘Whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three…
The Old Horse and the braying donkey
NoViolet Bulawayo’s first novel We Need New Names,shortlisted for the Booker in 2013, was a charming, tender gem, suffused with…
Sins of the mothers
Frida Liu, the 39-year-old mother of a toddler named Harriet, has a very bad day which will haunt her for…
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…
