Alex Clark

Extremes of passion: What Will Survive of Us, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

10 February 2024 9:00 am

On first meeting, Sam and Lily both suffer a coup de foudre and embark on an affair involving submission and sado-masochism. But where will it lead?

Three men in exile: My Friends, by Hisham Matar, reviewed

3 February 2024 9:00 am

Terror of discovery by the Libyan authorities haunts Khaled, Hosam and Mustafa after their protests against Gaddafi make their return home impossible

A cherry orchard, three sisters and a summer romance: Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, reviewed

29 July 2023 9:00 am

Alex Clark enjoys a poignant story centring on a cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother’s past love affair

Adolescent angst

6 May 2023 9:00 am

A violent adolescent breaks out of his ‘Last Chance’ reform home at dead of night – but can he ever escape his inner turmoil?

Mad men plotting: The Unfolding, by A.M. Homes, reviewed

17 September 2022 9:00 am

Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother,…

A playful version of the universe: Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti, reviewed

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both…

A cursed place: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, reviewed

15 January 2022 9:00 am

Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world…

An impossible guest: Second Place, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed

29 May 2021 9:00 am

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…

Even Anne Tyler can’t make a solitary Baltimore janitor sound interesting

4 April 2020 9:00 am

Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his…

Born again: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences —…

Drowning in superstition: a magnificent thriller of medieval England

24 March 2018 9:00 am

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far…

Jeffrey Archer: Jeremy Corbyn will be PM because the voters are sick of us Tories

18 November 2017 9:00 am

Always go to a storyteller if you want a sparky answer to a question. What does Jeffrey Archer, bestselling author,…

Aircraft carriers USS Midway and the USS Enterprise of the United States NavY, 1945 (Photo: Getty)

On the waterfront

14 October 2017 9:00 am

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and…

The man who disappeared

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…

Mother Medea

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype…

When less is more

24 September 2016 9:00 am

It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before…

Mournful and meticulous

16 July 2016 9:00 am

After a curtain-twitching cul-de-sac, a Preston shopping precinct, and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints brought to Lancashire, Jenn Ashworth…

Julie Myerson captures the sorrow that surpasses all understanding

5 March 2016 9:00 am

As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…

Erica Jong's middle-aged dread

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only…

Introducing the silent narrator

5 September 2015 9:00 am

Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an…

‘I was facing truths I didn’t particularly want to look at’: Michael Moorcock interview

8 August 2015 9:00 am

Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost

A novel to cure fear of missing out

1 August 2015 9:00 am

Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite…

Women go off the rails

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman —…

Hock and partridge help fascism go down in 1930s London

14 March 2015 9:00 am

Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…