The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed
An ambitious young black woman working for a charitable trust clashes with its white octogenarian founder over what each thinks they deserve
Repenting at leisure: Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler, reviewed
Back with his family in suburban Philadelphia after seven years of solid boozing, Dennis Monk tries to make amends for past misdemeanours. But will he succeed?
Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man
Descriptions of the gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are deeply poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent despatches from hospital
The difficulties faced by identical twins
Being the genetic copy of another human not only presents problems of individuality but offers a ‘rare form of experimental control’, says William Viney
A troubling Eden
Scandal engulfs a female rector when her chief bellringer is accused of child-molesting and paintings in the parish church are judged sacrilegious
The lady vanishes: Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, reviewed
When Cecilia disappears, her husband and children are left haunted by the mystery – until a character in a German novel strikes the daughter as strangely familiar
A treasury of wisdom about the writing life
In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt…
Planning a New Jerusalem: The Peckham Experiment, by Guy Ware, reviewed
Twin brothers sponsor a radical building programme in postwar Britain – but the collapse of a tower block raises questions of conscience and accountability
Inside New India: Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed
The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative…
The first Cambridge spy: A Fine Madness, by Alan Judd, reviewed
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…
Eliminate the positive: Come Join Our Disease, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
The children’s hour: first novels brim with close family observations
Kiley Reid’s Philadelphia-set debut, Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a satire on white saviour syndrome, woke culture and…
The latest first novels are full of romantic misadventure
Andrew Ridker’s The Altruists (Viking, £20) is a Jewish family saga of academic parents and grown-up offspring. From this rather…
Six of the best short story collections
While the short story is currently under-going one of its periods of robust, if not rude, health, its two dominant…
Appointment with death
It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles…
Nine angst-ridden men
‘Insufficiency’ is a favourite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in…
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
