Fiction
Appearances are deceptive: Trio, by William Boyd, reviewed
Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives…
Breakdown in Berlin: Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed
‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from…
Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed
After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly…
Opposites attract: Just Like You, by Nick Hornby, reviewed
Babysitters are having a literary moment. Following Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age, Nick Hornby is the latest author…
A melting pot of mercenaries: Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed
‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at…
Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed
The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…
Tenderness and sorrow: Inside Story, by Martin Amis, reviewed
Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens,…
A dazzling fable about loneliness: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, reviewed
Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut…
Family secrets: Love Orange, by Natasha Randall, reviewed
The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence,…
Gay abandon: Islands of Mercy, by Rose Tremain, reviewed
Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old…
Primal longing: Blue Ticket, by Sophie Macintosh, reviewed
Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s…
Forlorn Plorn: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, reviewed
Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué…
Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…
My dazzling chum: Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed
Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of…
A story without redemption: The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, reviewed
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…
Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
A rainy day in the Highlands: Summerwater, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of…
Who is telling the truth in Kate Reed Petty’s True Story?
This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…
A toast to brotherhood: Summer, by Ali Smith, reviewed
The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the…
Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
A tide of paranoid distrust: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison, reviewed
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
Poetic miniatures: A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo, reviewed
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Stockholm syndrome: The Family Clause, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, reviewed
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
