Fiction
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…
Variations on a theme
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
Wrong time and place
Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man…
Night on a bare mountain
Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the…
Kings of the dung heap
One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…
Time and motion study
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
Mawkish melodrama
Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark…
Partying through the pandemic
It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of…
Ever-increasing circles
Those for whom Dave Eggers’s name evokes only his much praised memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may…
Banished queen
Shakespeare wastes no time on Lear’s backstory; we meet the brutal old autocrat as he divides his kingdom between two…
The frailty of love
In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him…
