Fiction
Less radical, less rich: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is a disappointment
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about…
Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of…
Our appetite for ‘folk horror’ appears to be insatiable
This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a…
Ian McEwan’s anti-Brexit satire is a damp squib
Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has…
Jessie Burton’s The Confession is, frankly, a bit heavy-handed
Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s…
Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is even better on second reading
Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking…
As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker
Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited…
An uncanny gift for prophecy — the genius of Michel Houellebecq
The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially…
Haunted by a black cat: Earwig, by Brian Catling, reviewed
Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist,…
A novel take on the Western: Inland, by Téa Obreht, reviewed
Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…
A child’s-eye view of the world: The Curse of the School Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, reviewed
Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The…
Eternal truths: Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry, reviewed
It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around…
Washed up in Istanbul: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much…
Star-crossed lovers: Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls, reviewed
The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary…
At long last love: Live a Little, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed
Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting…
Savagery in the Cape Colony: Red Dog, by Willem Anker, reviewed
Red Dog is an ambitious hybrid of a book. It was published in South Africa to wide acclaim in 2014…
Haunting short stories of fear and frustration
In Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her female protagonists grapple with abusive relationships, degree courses, difficult…
Beauty on the beach: Isolde, by Irina Odoevtseva, reviewed
France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home. So thinks…
A novel about depression that doesn’t depress: Starling Days, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, reviewed
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has achieved that rare feat, in her second novel Starling Days, of writing a convincing novel about…
An education in love: City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert, reviewed
One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is…
Mystery in the Sundarbans: Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh, reviewed
Meet Deen Datta, a nervous, practical and cautious man, born and brought up in Calcutta, who now lives in Brooklyn,…
Nights at the Lyceum: Shadowplay, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed
‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He…
Gen Xers v. Millennials: White, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed
Q: What’s worse than listening to someone ranting hysterically about Donald Trump? A: Listening to Bret Easton Ellis ranting hysterically…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal…
