Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
At last, a book about James Joyce that makes you laugh
I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I…
Only Iain Sinclair could glimpse Hackney in the wilds of Peru
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
The poet with many lives
This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the…
Puzzle Pieces: Cowboy Graves, by Roberto Bolaño, reviewed
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Escape from reality: How to Survive Everything, by Ewan Morrison, reviewed
Ewan Morrison is an intellectually nimble writer with a penchant for provocation. His work has included the novels, Distance, Ménage…
All change: The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads,…
Spotting the mountweazels: The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams, reviewed
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Mysteries of English village life: Creeping Jenny, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and…
Philip Hensher’s latest novel is a State of the Soul book
This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters…
Will Self’s memoir of drug addiction is a masterpiece of black humour
Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self refers…
Haunted by a black cat: Earwig, by Brian Catling, reviewed
Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist,…
Hitting the bull’s-eye: Hark, by Sam Lipsyte, reviewed
This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt…
Were the Highland Clearances really a byword for infamy?
There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the…
What does John Gray’s anti-atheism amount to?
K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…
More menace – and magic – on the moors
Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the…
Elegiac and exuberant: short stories from Philip Hensher and Helen Oyeyemi
Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a…
O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I!
Given this year’s 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, there was always going to be a slew of new publications; few,…
Love, Robert Lowell and poetic licence
The conceit of this book — the author’s third on Robert Lowell — is strong, although its execution is less…
Why on earth did Jeanette Winterson agree to retell Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale?
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept…
Wrangles over the Rust Belt
In the opening sentence of this subtle and finely poised novel, the narrator, Greg Marnier, known as ‘Marny’, admits that…
Seeds of a mystery in a great-aunt’s will
There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…
All roads lead to Blackpool in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, The Illuminations
The illuminations of Andrew O’Hagan’s fifth novel are both metaphysical and mundane. In the course of its taut plot, they…
