Fiction
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…
Inspiration from the past
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
Blindness and madness
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
A sense of fairytale
The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel. Written in 1959 when she was 50 it is…
