Fiction
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…
A fine finale
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
God is everywhere
Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and…
We are all mysteries
‘Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,’ according to Elizabeth Strout, who writes to help readers understand themselves…
A devilish assignment
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Strength through adversity
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
Unkindly light
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
In two minds
Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal.…
A slippery slope
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
A world full of noises
The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop…
Flight into danger
Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to…
A cultivated mystique
It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court…
Mann’s secret desires
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
A brainwave… or not
We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this…
Life, love and alienation
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
Addicted to love
Ruth, the narrator of Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is both the child of a single mother and a single mother…
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…
