Fiction
Hope springs eternal
What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question…
Souls for sale
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
Interpreting for a dictator
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Tough old world
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
Eye-popping misogyny
There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well…
Basic instincts
What does it mean to be a body in this world? It’s the question animating Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals. Our…
The flirt at the funeral
Here is a rare dud from the usually reliable Deborah Moggach. Her protagonist, Pru, finds herself alone at 69 after…
Last rites and wrongs
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…
The book as narrator
It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages…
A sly old fox
Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book…
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
Three brides for three brothers
Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation,…
Life and death decisions
Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry…
Peckham wry
Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the…
Ode to LA
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
Where’s Leni?
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
Dishing the dirt
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
City of dreams
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
The story of O
Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for…
Lashings of irony
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Across the universe
‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing…
Monsters and miracles
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…
The rising tide
In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like…
Plumbing the depths
Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a…
