Fiction
Slanging match
I’ve tried hard to think of someone I dislike enough to recommend this novel to, but have failed. Elfriede Jelinek…
Women of the gospels
The gnostic Gospel of Mary has long been the subject of controversy, even as to which of the several Marys…
Bright and beautiful
Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject…
Truckload of trouble
A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This…
On the game
For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in…
A robot with feelings
The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is…
On the defensive
Lauren Oyler is viral and vicious. A critic with a reputation for pulling no punches, she is known for delivering…
Weeping wounds
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…
Yummy mummy
Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from…
Anonymous alcoholics
Mick Herron has been called ‘the John le Carré of his generation’ by the crime writer Val McDermid, and in…
The monk’s tale
In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what…
The invisible man
Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most…
Portrait of the artist as a young woman
One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2020, Raven Leilani’s debut comes acclaimed by a literary Who’s Who that includes…
Life and death decisions
Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard…
House of horrors
If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and…
Longing to belong
Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts,…
Ancestral voices
Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the…
Easy pills to swallow
Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…
Flight from reality
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Raw Bacon
Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max…
Unhealed wounds
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
‘People confuse sadness with darkness’
An interview with the American novelist Mary Gaitskill
You, the protagonist
When the estimable Andy Miller, the host of the Backlisted podcast, recommended a new collection of short stories on Twitter,…
When all else fails…
This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads,…
In the same boat
‘We should be living in a brave country and on a brave planet that bravely distributes its occupants,’ thinks Rose…
