Fiction
Ali Smith’s Winter is calm, cool and consoling
In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge…
On the waterfront
Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and…
Gleaming pictures of the past
If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt…
Highly charged territory
I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the…
Putting the boot into Italy
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
Apostle of gloom
Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…
Brotherly love
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the…
Deep learning
Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…
Harsh, but entertaining
When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…
A game of cat-and-mouse
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…
Madness in Manhattan
Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…
Looking back, losing bits
As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
The violence of poverty
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…
When mother killed the plumber — and Nellie Melba came round to sing
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
A Christmas parable from the Spectator’s business editor
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes…
Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil
After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering…
Umberto Eco really tries our patience
Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary…
‘I was facing truths I didn’t particularly want to look at’: Michael Moorcock interview
Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost
Suite Francaise review: what is this film playing at, when it comes to Jews in attics?
Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is…
Sebastian Faulks’s diary: My task for 2015 – get a job
Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I…
Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…
