Book review – fiction
Shadows of the past are ominously present in a trio of memorable first novels
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
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
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
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…
For Julian Barnes, the only story is a love story — and it’s inevitably sad
The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century…
Michelle de Kretser: the modern Australian Jane Austen
Twenty-odd pages into Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, I pounded the table and bellowed an Australian-accented ‘fuck yeah!’…
An 80th birthday party causes no end of trouble in Barney Norris’s latest novel
‘People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them,’ muses the…
Jenny Erpenbeck finds a novel way to tackle the migrant problem
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires,…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
Susie Boyt neatly skewers the self-help trends
Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks…
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…
The enigma of Enric Marco
Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil…
More secrets and symbols
Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…
How to be good
Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His…
A choice of first novels
Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The…
Unearthly powers
This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family…
Three daemons in a boat
Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer…
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…
That’s no lady
Did I enjoy this novel? Yes! Nevertheless, it dismayed me. How could John Banville, whom I’ve admired so much ever…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
