Fiction
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…
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…
