Lee Langley

Rumpelstiltskin retold: Alive in the Merciful Country, by A.L. Kennedy, reviewed

4 January 2025 9:00 am

A group of idealistic activists is betrayed by a charismatic newcomer who dazzles with skill and charm – and gets away with murder. Repeatedly

Panning for music gold: The Catchers, by Xan Brooks, reviewed

12 October 2024 9:00 am

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading…

Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain in this ‘health resort horror story’ set in a Silesian guesthouse on the eve of the first world war

Runaway lovers: The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

29 June 2024 9:00 am

In 19th-century Butte, Montana, a reluctant new bride falls in love with the young man sent to photograph her – leading to violent retribution for the doomed couple

The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed

9 March 2024 9:00 am

Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes

Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

A lonely teenager on holiday in Italy befriends his grandparents’ elderly gardener and slowly coaxes out his painful memories of betrayals and reprisals during the war

Heart of Darkness revisited: The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson, reviewed

4 November 2023 9:00 am

Conrad’s classic is updated in this sinister tale of the US government’s involvement in a morally suspect virtual reality programme

Anonymous caller: This Plague of Souls, by Mike McCormack, reviewed

21 October 2023 9:00 am

A man returns to his remote rural home after an absence – to be greeted not by his family but a sinister stranger on the telephone

Private obsessions

22 July 2023 9:00 am

A world of private fetishes, obsessions, childhood memories and literary passions is dazzlingly revealed in 13 short stories

Too close to home

24 June 2023 9:00 am

Life in a comfortable modern flat with her husband and two young sons leaves Natsumi so depressed she thinks she’s losing her mind

Inside the Factory

4 March 2023 9:00 am

When two teenage typists employed by Andy Warhol start tagging along to his amphetamine-fuelled parties, their lives spiral out of control

Day of vengeance

28 January 2023 9:00 am

A festive gathering in the depths of rural France is fatally disrupted by a trio of sinister strangers

Bittersweet memories: Ti Amo, by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed

3 September 2022 9:00 am

This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…

Dangerous liaisons: Bad Eminence, by James Greer, reviewed

2 July 2022 9:00 am

Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…

Murder, suicide and apocalypse: Here Goes Nothing, by Steve Toltz, reviewed

30 April 2022 9:00 am

Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of…

Lasting infamy: Booth, by Karen Joy Fowler, reviewed

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Were it not for an event on the night of 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth would be remembered, if…

A wife for King Lear — J.R. Thorp imagines another Lady Macbeth

6 November 2021 9:00 am

Shakespeare wastes no time on Lear’s backstory; we meet the brutal old autocrat as he divides his kingdom between two…

A 21st-century Holden Caulfield: The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozecki, reviewed

25 September 2021 9:00 am

The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop…

Brave new virtual world: The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, reviewed

29 May 2021 9:00 am

Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…

Ghosts of the past: The Field, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

17 April 2021 9:00 am

Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…

Two for the road: We Are Not in the World, by Conor O’Callaghan, reviewed

13 March 2021 9:00 am

A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This…

An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the…

Lacrimae rerum: That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

17 October 2020 9:00 am

Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners,…

As intricate as an origami sculpture: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow reviewed

21 March 2020 9:00 am

Steampunk, a shapeshifting and unpredictable genre, has a way of subverting the past, mischievously disordering the universe with historical what-ifs.…

Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?

18 January 2020 9:00 am

‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…