Fiction
The next big thing
Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…
L and M
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…
Birds of a feather
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…
Lectures with laughs
Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’…
Visitations from Franco
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in…
Revolution and repression
Certain novels complicate the very notion of literary enjoyment. This, by the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building,…
An unholy trinity
Lisa McInerney likes the rule of three. Three novels set in Cork structured around sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and, within…
The first Cambridge spy
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…
A moving target
‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get…
On the edge
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
Theft by stealth
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
Family feeling
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Eliminate the positive
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
As time goes by
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Lost for words
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
Puzzle pieces
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Encircling gloom
When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…
The worst of times
Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest…
From beyond the grave
Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…
The scholar and the gypsy
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
The parent trap
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
Black mischief
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
Man about the house
I have enjoyed many of Alan Warner’s previous novels, so it gives me no pleasure to report that his new…
Weighty matters
This is a novel about ‘mommy issues’. Rachel is a Reform Jew, ‘more Chanel bag Jew than Torah Jew’, and…
Escape from reality
Ewan Morrison is an intellectually nimble writer with a penchant for provocation. His work has included the novels, Distance, Ménage…
