Fiction
The time of our lives
Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of…
The truth is difficult
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…
The house on the Heath
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Holiday washout
There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of…
What really happened?
This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…
An ode to brotherhood
The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the…
The dear departed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
A fog of forgetfulness
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
A tide of distrust
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
Small is beautiful
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Return of the patriarch
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Juggling a hot potato
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
Sad and beautiful
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work…
Deeply disturbing
Sorry For Your Trouble (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song.…
All change
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
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…
