Fiction
Life and death in 1970s Belfast: For the Good Times, by David Keenan, reviewed
David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that…
Biting political satire: China Dream, by Ma Jian, reviewed
Ma Jian’s novels have been banned in his native China for 30 years and he has been hailed as ‘China’s…
The gambler and the hooker: Awful Beauty, by Andrei Navrozov, reviewed
This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker…
Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, by Mathias Enard, reviewed
Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn,…
Chains and planes: Turbulence, by David Szalay, reviewed
In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill,…
Does an autobiographical novel really count as fiction?
Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer…
A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…
Horrors of the house of wax: Little, by Edward Carey, reviewed
The reader of Edward Carey’s Little must have a tender heart and a strong stomach. You will weep, you will…
A novel view of Brexit: Middle England, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed
Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane and funny novels, but you sometimes suspect he wants to write more audacious ones. He…
Treat in store: Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed
In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey, in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist named Mary Treat studied the…
Manic creations: Lost Empress: A Protest, by Sergio De La Pava, reviewed
American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava,…
Gatsby in Japan: Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami, reviewed
Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed…
Kidnapped by Kett: Tombland, by C.J. Sansom, reviewed
Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as…
Secrets and lies: Berta Isla, by Javier Marías, reviewed
A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most…
The passions of Paulo: Enigma Variations, by André Aciman, reviewed
André Aciman’s 2007 debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, was a sensuous, captivating account of the passionate love a…
The urge to purge: it’s closure at last for the tortured Karl Ove Knausgaard
And so it comes, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence: a pale brick of a book,…
It happened one summer: Bitter Orange, by Claire Fuller, reviewed
Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler…
A Weekend in New York, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer —…
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get…
A love letter to the short story
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a…
Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of…
The Shape of the Ruins, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, reviewed
What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the…
Happy Little Bluebirds, by Louise Levene, reviewed
In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote…
The wilder shores of excess in William Trevor’s fiction
A very prolific and long-standing writer of short stories reveals himself. William Trevor, who died in 2016, owned up to…
Zen tales and flights of fancy: Patient X reviewed
The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of…
