A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed
A group of privileged teenagers at Buckley School, Los Angeles medicate themselves on champagne, cocaine and mindless sex – until something awful happens
Knotty problems: French Braid, by Anne Tyler, reviewed
Anne Tyler’s 24th novel French Braid opens in 2010 in Philadelphia train station. We find the teenage Serena, who has…
Sowing seeds of comfort
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
Bright and beautiful: Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn, reviewed
Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject…
A panoramic novel of modern Britain: The Blind Light, by Stuart Evers, reviewed
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…
If you haven’t read Louise Erdrich, now’s the time to start: The Night Watchman reviewed
Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa when the US Congress imposed…
Moon walks with the Romantic poets
Several years ago, I was interviewing the garden writer and designer Sarah Raven at her home in Sussex when a…
Has Dave Eggers finally found his voice?
The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down…
An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed
‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…
Does an autobiographical novel really count as fiction?
Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer…
Pithy and profound: the beauty of aphorisms
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to…
A hedge-fund protagonist – Gary Shteyngart takes aim in Lake Success
‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured…
