Book review – fiction

Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed

30 June 2018 9:00 am

Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…

An agent from the Freedman’s Bureau separates freed slaves from an angry mob at the end of the American civil war. Credit Getty Images

A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed

23 June 2018 9:00 am

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…

A rare photograph by Bernice Abbott of Lucia Joyce dancing in the 1920s

Lucia, by Alex Pheby, reviewed

23 June 2018 9:00 am

In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the…

Rachel Kushner

The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner reviewed

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler…

Meg Wolitzer. (Rex Features)

The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer reviewed

2 June 2018 9:00 am

It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me…

Sheila Heti

Motherhood, by Sheila Heti reviewed

2 June 2018 9:00 am

‘I don’t think this was something I ever felt’, Sheila Heti writes in Motherhood — ‘that my body, my life,…

Alison Moore

Missing, by Alison Moore reviewed

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well…

Couldn’t Diana Evans’s fretful couples just shut up and deal with it?

5 May 2018 9:00 am

My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I…

The daring exploits of Romain Gary

28 April 2018 9:00 am

When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen…

A single mother hits rock bottom in Tokyo: Territory of Light reviewed

28 April 2018 9:00 am

Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the…

Our sheltered lives have made us overly fearful: Aminatta Forna’s Happiness reviewed

21 April 2018 9:00 am

In her keynote lecture for a conference on ‘The Muse and the Market’ in 2015 Aminatta Forna mounted a powerful…

Six wintry days in Saratoga Springs: Upstate by James Wood reviewed

14 April 2018 9:00 am

Alan Querry, the central figure in James Wood’s second novel, is someone who, in his own words, doesn’t ‘think about…

The Spanish court’s fondness for dwarfs and dogs is captured by Velázquez

Spend, spend, spend at the court of Philip IV of Spain

7 April 2018 9:00 am

‘Nine hours,’ boasted my friend the curator about his trip to the Prado. Nine! Two hours is my upper limit…

How can we know what dead people want?

7 April 2018 9:00 am

In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as…

Alarm bells ring when I read about grown women and dolls

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Mona — single, childless, pushing 60 — sells wooden dolls made by a carpenter friend, which she delicately costumes from…

Down’s syndrome and dystopia in Jesse Bull’s Census

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from…

‘Spanish troops loot a village in Flanders during the Thirty Years War’, by Sebastian Vrancx

Simplicius Simplicissimus and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War

31 March 2018 9:00 am

On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in…

Drowning in superstition: a magnificent thriller of medieval England

24 March 2018 9:00 am

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far…

A nightmare scenario in the city of dreaming spires

17 March 2018 9:00 am

‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at…

Frankenstein’s monster is more frightening than ever

17 March 2018 9:00 am

On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon…

Jessie Greengrass’s Sight is unashamedly philosophical

10 March 2018 9:00 am

The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an…

Shadows of the past are ominously present in a trio of memorable first novels

10 March 2018 9:00 am

The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section…

You deserve a prize if you manage to finish Jim Crace’s latest novel

3 March 2018 9:00 am

This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear…

The Charlie Hebdo attacks form a backdrop to a complicated love triangle in C.K. Stead’s latest novel

17 February 2018 9:00 am

There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels…

Denis Johnson: where pain and comedy collide

3 February 2018 9:00 am

The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies,…