Book review – fiction
High drama on the high seas
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…
The watchers and the watched: Patrick Flanery's I Am No One
‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…
How not to tell a soldier’s story
Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties:…
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
A fairytale return for Graham Swift
The opening of Graham Swift’s new novel clearly signals his intent. ‘Once upon a time’ tells us that this will…
Inside the mind of a molester
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
Tim Parks’s one-sided ‘love story’ is a long trudge in the rain
The title of Tim Parks’s 17th novel is false advertising, because Thomas and Mary: A Love Story is barely a…
The mother of all problems
For a child, the idea of ‘knowing’ your mother doesn’t compute; she’s merely there. As an adult, there may be…
The tortured genius of Shostakovich
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
John Irving spoilt my Christmas
This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons. The comments on…
Maxim Gorky’s revolutionaries are ready for martyrdom
Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of…
An Egyptian comedy of errors
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in…
Stella Gibbons’s ‘lost work’ should have remained in the drawer
One of the great fascinations of a ‘lost’ work by a famous name dredged up out of the vault after…
The ultimate New York parking novel
Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make…
The loneliness of Katherine Carlyle
‘Mystery comes through clarity’, is how Rupert Thomson recently described the effect he was trying to achieve in writing. It’s…
Erica Jong's middle-aged dread
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only…
Time is of the essence in Helen Simpson’s Cockfosters
Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with…
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
The Butcher of Bosnia holes up in an Irish backwater
The cover of Edna O’Brien’s 17th novel sports a handsome quote from Philip Roth: ‘The great Edna O’Brien has written…
To the ends of the earth — but not back
What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing…
Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
The Peasants’ Revolt — such a thrilling moment in English history — has eluded novelists in the past
Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’…
Bedtime reading at Hallowe’en
The thick of autumn is upon us, dear reader, and with it the shivers. Around Hallowe’en you may be tempted…
David Mitchell is in a genre of his own
David Mitchell’s new book, Slade House, is not quite a novel and not really a collection of short stories. It…
John Lennon’s desert island luxury
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…
