Book review – fiction
A jaunty romp of rape and pillage through the 16th century
The Brethren, by Robert Merle, who died at the age of 95 ten years ago, was originally published in 1977,…
Wave goodbye to the weight-gaining, drunk-driving Inspector Wallander
Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was…
James Ellroy’s latest attempt to unseat the Great American Novel
Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that,…
Colm Toibin’s restraint – like his characters' – is quietly overwhelming
In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home…
If you don’t think this novel is practically perfect, I’ll send you a replacement
If there were a harvest festival to honour the bounty of the autumnal book crop, the choir would be in…
David Nicholls’ Us: Alan Partridge’s Grand Tour
Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for…
This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
Andrew Marr thinks he’s a novelist. I don’t
It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming,…
A Troubles novel with plenty of violence and, thank heaven, some sex too
‘The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying. . . . They will go without a struggle, unlamented,’ Christopher Bland, 76, declares…
It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece
At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…
When Rachel Cusk went to Greece: would she be nice or nasty?
Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly…
How on earth did David Mitchell's third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?
Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999),…
Improbable, unconvincing and lazy - Ian McEwan’s latest is unforgivable
The Children Act could hardly be more attuned to the temper of the times, appearing just as our newspapers are…
Ali Smith's How to be Both: warm, funny, subtle, intelligent – and baffling
Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a…
In love with the lodger
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…
Kafka goes to Dubai
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…
A novel that will make you want to call social services
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis's best for 25 years
‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…
The hooligan and the psychopath
A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s…
Soviet greyness, literary mediocrity and hot dates
Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare…
Like Birdsong – only cheerful
It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica…
Tip-toeing through Sri Lanka
‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator…
A coming of age novel? Or an age of coming novel?
At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon…
The soundtracked novel that won’t sit still
The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each…
