Fiction
Dark secrets
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
The psychedelic scene
There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in…
Swirling meditations on language
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Criss cross
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
Ghoulish entertainment
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
A troubled past
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…
The road to Rome
Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of…
Middle-aged thrills
Beth, the protagonist of Joanna Briscoe’s The Seduction, reminded me of Clare in Tessa Hadley’s debut, Accidents in the Home.…
Northern noir
It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…
Feeling left behind
In her 2010 novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver examined the American healthcare system with a spiky sensitivity. Big…
Together and apart
Twins are literary dynamite. For writers, they’re perfect for thrashing out notions of free will, the pinballing of cause and…
A radical mismatch
Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be…
The Stacey Abrams presidency
‘You don’t run for second place.’ That’s how Stacey Abrams responded when asked if she would consider being presidential hopeful…
Opposites attract
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…
Drawing a blank
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
Least said, soonest mended
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
Sadness and scandal
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
The perfect stranger
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled,…
Deepest, darkest desires
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing…
Village of the damned peculiar
I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and…
The great philanderer
Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well…
Sinister toy story
We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of…
Catch me if you can
NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno…
The ‘other’ other half
Conservative estimates place the number of those in America with more than one spouse as up to 100,000, but the…
All about Eve
On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from…
