A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed
The story of the disappearance from an Essex manor house of a Romanian astronomer named Maria Vaduva starts to obsess a local journalist a century later
Small but perfect: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan reviewed
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting
The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed
St Cuthbert’s body, rescued from the ‘devilish Danes’, is carried for hundreds of years to its eventual shrine in Durham cathedral
Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
Memory test: The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, reviewed
On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer…
Compassion and a gift for friendship are touchingly evident in Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing…
Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed
A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use…
Dublin double act: Love, by Roddy Doyle, reviewed
Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s…
Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
Violence and cross-dressing in post-bellum Tennessee: A Thousand Moons, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed
It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since…
Does questioning women about their sex lives constitute harassment?
Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure,…
Lusting after Bathsheba: Lux, by Elizabeth Cook, reviewed
The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or…
Too much American angst: the latest short stories reviewed
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M.…
Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?
Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box…
My First Love
I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was…
The Shock of the Fall is a worthy Costa Book of the Year
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
