Fiction
Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
Leni Riefenstahl is missing: The Dictator’s Muse, by Nigel Farndale, reviewed
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
Sweet and sour: Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
O father, where art thou? Fox Fires, by Wyl Menmuir, reviewed
Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for…
A smart take on literary London: Dead Souls, by Sam Riviere, reviewed
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Journey to the Moon: The Things We’ve Seen, by Agustín Fernández Mallo, reviewed
‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing…
A Danubian Narnia: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, reviewed
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…
And then there were five: The High House, by Jessie Greengrass, reviewed
In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like…
A draining experience: Insignificance, by James Clammer, reviewed
Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a…
Brave new virtual world: The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, reviewed
Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…
An impossible guest: Second Place, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…
Bird-brained: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, reviewed
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…
A campus novel with a difference: The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen, reviewed
Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’…
Haunted by the past: Last Days in Cleaver Square, by Patrick McGrath, reviewed
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in…
Cairo in crisis: The Republic of False Truths, by Alaa Al Aswany, reviewed
Certain novels complicate the very notion of literary enjoyment. This, by the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building,…
A funny time to be Irish: The Rules of Revelation, by Lisa McInerney, reviewed
Lisa McInerney likes the rule of three. Three novels set in Cork structured around sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and, within…
The first Cambridge spy: A Fine Madness, by Alan Judd, reviewed
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…
Hitting the buffers: The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, reviewed
‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get…
An independent observer: Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
Stealing the story: A Lonely Man, by Chris Power, reviewed
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
Water, water everywhere: Touring the Land of the Dead, by Maki Kashimada, reviewed
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Eliminate the positive: Come Join Our Disease, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
A meditation on everyday life: Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny, reviewed
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Ice and snow and sea and sky: Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor, reviewed
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
