Books
The Adulterants: a caustic take on London’s brutal property market
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The…
Spain has effectively obliterated Franco’s memory
Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the…
The body count piles up in Mick Herron’s London Rules
The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely…
The Book of Joan: part apocalyptic tale, part erotic poem
Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines…
Hitler’s charm offensive at the Berlin Olympics was a sinister cover for his main offensive
The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
César Aira returns to the evocative small-town landscape of his youth
The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the…
Why do people risk their lives to fight for a foreign cause?
What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the…
Kafa, the birthplace of coffee, was a kingdom straight out of Rider Haggard
For many of us, coffee is the lift that eases the load of our working day. Yet the sharpened mental…
It’s not a wave’s crest, but its translucent interior that surfers dream of
Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and…
How Lucky Lucan begged me for money shortly before mistakenly murdering the nanny
A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south…
A century of Ethiopia’s turbulent history, seen through the life of one woman
Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she…
Despite her inability to talk or swallow, Genevieve Fox brims with joie de vivre
A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve…
Churchill was all in favour of a united Europe — as long as it didn’t include Britain
Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard…
Mary Whitehouse’s publishers also produced Gang Girls, The Degenerates and Bikers at War
The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish…
The more outrageous sf fantasies give way to soft dystopias
Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…
The Charlie Hebdo attacks form a backdrop to a complicated love triangle in C.K. Stead’s latest novel
There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels…
The Fighting Kangaroo
Jim Eames, an established and respected aviation writer, whose previous credits include The Flying Kangaroo, a history of Qantas, has…
Do the Americans know who they’re fighting in Afghanistan — or why?
Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul…
Is the bubble about to burst in the absurdly inflated contemporary art market?
I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few…
Denis Johnson: where pain and comedy collide
The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies,…
Trying hard to be somebody in Trump’s America
For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late…
Crime and puzzlement in Tony White’s Oulipo-inspired novel
Tony White’s latest novel begins for all the world like a police procedural, following the delightfully named sleuth Rex King…
Nick Coleman hears better with half an ear than the rest of us do with two
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
