Fiction
Boundless blessings
Ann Patchett’s novels revel in the tightly constructed ecosystems imagined for their characters: an opera singer besieged among diplomats in…
Homage to Elizabeth the first
‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains…
Thirty years on
Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy,…
The thrill of the chase
Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a…
Paradise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
The imitable Jeeves
For as long as I can remember — I take neither pleasure nor pride in the admission — I have…
Dancing to a different tune
Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money…
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
Once upon a time there were…
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
An Affair to remember
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial…
…and murderous, child-molesting mystics
Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of…
Vichy from the inside
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le…
No use crying over spilt blood
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the…
Belgian fancy
In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry,…
A world without Wallis
In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now…
Multilingual Chinese whispers
There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists…
It’s never too late
In 1998, the Jamaican singer Bounty Killer released a single, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should…
No Hungarian rhapsody
Novels about growing up have two great themes: loss of innocence and the forging of identity. With this sparky, sharp-eyed…
The traffic in falsehood
The term ‘419’ is drawn from the article in the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. However, it has transcended…
At cross purposes
Justin Cartwright is famously a fan of John Updike — and here he seems to owe a definite debt to…
From brilliance to burn-out
Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel,…
Trying to keep afloat
The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful…
The inside story
Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as…
A legend in his own time
The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help…
The great American nightmare
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
