Simon Baker 
Novel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change… Read more
Friendships resurrected
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve,… Read more
The man who came to dinner
Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say,… Read more
BOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter
Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). Salley Vickers name-checks… Read more
The loneliness of the long distance salesman
If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. If only E.… Read more
Anything for a quiet life
Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Follows, marks a deliberate change from past form. Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Fol lows, marks a deliberate change from past form. Gone… Read more
Just the bare bones
It is impossible (as I prove in this sentence) to review Philip Roth without mentioning the surge of creativity that began when the author was around 60 and which now… Read more
The ex factor
At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked, seems too close to that of his first novel, High Fidelity (1995). At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s… Read more
Past imperfect
We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies We Are All Made of Glue is Marina… Read more
One out of five
Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book… Read more
Dark fantasies
Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only… Read more
A choice of first novels
A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz Pollard, by Laura Beatty Chatto & Windus Inside the Whale, by Jennie Rooney Chatto & Windus Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight Doubleday… Read more
A furious, frazzled youth
Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War… Read more
Deceit and dilemma
Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he… Read more
Another tragic Russian heroine
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first… Read more
The travels of an idealist
Simon Baker reviews Andreï Makine’s latest novel In Andreï Makine’s previous novel, The Woman Who Waited (2006), which is set in 1970s USSR, the unnamed narrator sees through his peers’ weak ideologies;… Read more
A boy’s own world
The pilcrow is a typographical symbol which looks like this: ¶. It was once used in writing (often of the philosophical or religious kind) to indicate a new line of… Read more
The magic lingers on
At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor,… Read more
Sounds of the Seventies
One of the difficult tasks when writing fiction about the recent past is to let the reader know the approximate year in which the action is taking place without giving… Read more
No getting away from it
Some non-fiction books seem inevitable before they are even written. Dawkins on atheism, Hitchens on contrarianism, Ackroyd on London: with such works, the author is allied so closely to the… Read more
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