Fiction
Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…
Zimbabwe’s chaotic history has at least produced some outstanding fiction
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean…
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a long, hard slog
The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who sounds like a sneeze and reads like a fever, is on a mission to…
Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed
It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful…
Dave Eggers’s satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed
A feckless moron is appointed to the captaincy of a ship, despite having no nautical experience. The Captain has a…
Tame family dramas: Christmas in Austin, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
My partner’s brother once found himself accidentally locked into his flat on Christmas Day, which meant having to spend it…
The good sex award goes to Sarah Hall: Sudden Traveller reviewed
Sarah Hall should probably stop publishing short stories for a while to give other writers a chance. If she’s not…
Nostalgia for old Ceylon: lush foliage and tender feelings from Romesh Gunesekera
Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor…
Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances
Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in…
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…
