Smugglers’ gold: Winchelsea, by Alex Preston, reviewed
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Death and dishonour: The Promise, by Damon Galgut, reviewed
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…
Cairo in crisis: The Republic of False Truths, by Alaa Al Aswany, reviewed
Certain novels complicate the very notion of literary enjoyment. This, by the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building,…
The Generic Asian Man: Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, reviewed
Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most…
A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed
Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which…
A dazzling fable about loneliness: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, reviewed
Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut…
Madcap escapades: The All True Adventures (and Rare Education) of the Daredevil Daniel Bones, by Owen Booth, reviewed
The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains,…
The sorrows of young Hillary: Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed
Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be…
Dr Livingstone becomes a dead weight: Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah
The scope of Petina Gappah’s impressive novel is laid out in the prologue: the death of the Victorian explorer David…
The wanderings of Ullis: Low, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed
Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in…
The novel Silicon Valley’s tech moguls won’t be amused to read
Silicon Valley moguls might not find Zed a particularly amusing read. Joanna Kavenna’s latest mindbender features the CEO of a…
Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, by Mathias Enard, reviewed
Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn,…
Some novels are aptly named – Distortion is one of them
Coming 12 years after his acclaimed debut, Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s second novel Distortion features a vivid argot, complicating and defamiliarising…
Playing for time
In a pleasing nod to Marcel Proust, Eustace, the middle-aged protagonist of Patrick Gale’s new novel, is propelled into memories…
From the Iliad to the IRA: Country, by Michael Hughes, reviewed
Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the…
America’s wittiest women fight to be taken seriously
From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to…
The murderer who got away – and the woman who died in pursuit
This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker…
Has Paul Theroux finally lost it?
As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I…
Something scary in the attic
How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but…
A bleak future — without cabbages or kings
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
A broad farce about banking’s dirty secrets in post-Celtic-Tiger Dublin
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
