Book review – fiction
No pain, no gain
It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed…
A choice of first novels
Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…
The evil that men do
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
Le Clézio’s The Prospector: from tropical beaches to the trenches of the Somme
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
Crime pursues the crime writer
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection…
Sexual tension and Siberian magic mushrooms
On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants…
Chaos among the commodes in Nina Stibbe’s old folks’ home
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
Sinister summer reading for children
Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz,…
Don DeLillo foresees the imminent death of death
Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and…
Lizzie Bennet is catapulted to America
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short…
Disgusted of London - A.L. Kennedy's Serious Sweet reviewed
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Andrey Kurkov’s The Bickford Fuse is a satirical masterpiece
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
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…
Marina Lewycka’s Granny steals the show
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
Losers in the game of life
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…
Training the horse from hell
There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other…
Sex, violence and anticlimax in 16 (very short) chapters
‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…
From Jekyll back to Hyde: the changing face of Begbie
Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel Train-spotting flicked a hearty V-sign in the face of alarm-clock Britain. ‘Ah choose no tae…
The Cauliflower®: Nicola Barker’s divine comedy
Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had…
