Fiction
Who needs psychogeography? Plume, by Will Wiles, reviewed
With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like…
Is there no end to the retelling of classical myths?
In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
A very tangled web: Liar, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed
The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ – see above left (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of…
Satirising the global society: Only Americans Burn in Hell, by Jarett Kobek, reviewed
An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This…
An outsider inside: We, The Survivors, by Tash Aw, reviewed
It’s not immediately obvious who the survivors in Tash Aw’s formidable new novel are, or who the narrator even is,…
Toy boy: Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan, reviewed
What kind of loyalty do we owe a robot we’ve paid for — one who exhibits a convincingly human kind…
The Bears v. the Rabbits: The Feral Detective, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Jonathan Lethem’s new book is billed as ‘his first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn’, which won America’s national book critics…
Barefoot in the park: Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yu Miri, reviewed
In 1923, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 struck Tokyo and Yokohama. A huge area of Tokyo burned. But,…
Farewell Bernie Gunther: Metropolis, by Philip Kerr, reviewed
Philip Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, was published 30 years ago. From the start, the format was a…
The cruise of a lifetime: Proleterka, by Fleur Jaeggy, reviewed
Near the start of Fleur Jaeggy’s extraordinary novel Proleterka, the unnamed narrator reflects: ‘Children lose interest in their parents when…
Further adventures of a dysfunctional family: Reasons to be Cheerful, by Nina Stibbe, reviewed
My ex-dentist resembled a potato wearing a Patek Phillipe. In those precious moments between the golf course and the cruise…
Missive from a living fossil: Little Boy, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reviewed
In his adopted city of San Francisco, the poet, publisher and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti is venerated to levels nearing those…
In the pavilion of fun: Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken, reviewed
Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, is a great American candy-colour Buddenbrooks, a multi-generational epic spanning almost 100…
Tolkien in Africa: Black Leopard Red Wolf, by Marlon James, reviewed
Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit,…
An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed
‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…
Shakespeare on the beach: Oh I Do Like to Be…, by Marie Phillips, reviewed
The phrase ‘Shakespeare comedy’ is an oxymoron with a long pedigree, one which perhaps stretches back to the late 16th…
Cycle of violence: Blood, by Maggie Gee, reviewed
Maggie Gee has written 14 novels including The White Family, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s…
Beware the female stalker: Dream Sequence, by Adam Foulds, reviewed
Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on…
The ghostly Thames: Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, reviewed
While its shape is famous — prominent on maps of London and Oxford — the Thames is ‘unmappable’, according to…
Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…
Partying with John and Yoko: The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, reviewed
Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts…
Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed
There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…
Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed
From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…
An Igbo Paradise Lost: An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma, reviewed
Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man…
