Books
Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard - review
Nothing in Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park betrays the fact that it is his first period novel: not its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit, or its… Read more
The Dark Road, by Ma Jian - review
If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of… Read more
Whirligig, by Magnus Mcintyre - review
I do not have much time for the idea of the redemptive power of the countryside. I am not alone in this. Even theologians tend to dream of the day… Read more
Last Friends, by Jane Gardam - review
Any writer who embarks on a trilogy is either extremely confident or taking something of a risk. The danger is that the reader will have forgotten the first two volumes… Read more
Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, Beautiful Fools, by R. Clifton Spargo, Careless People, by Sarah Churchill - review
The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature, like Pride and Prejudice, that appeals as much to the general reader as to the literary bod. It’ll always… Read more
All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld - review
Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description… Read more
The Hive, by Gill Hornby - review
Who would have thought that the idea for a novel about mothers at the school gate would spark a frenzied bidding for world rights? Not a subject to make the… Read more
Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor
An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s… Read more
Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver - review
‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the… Read more
And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini - review
The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They… Read more
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi - review
Excitement over the extraterritorial birthplace of authors on Granta’s recent list of Britain’s best young novelists must have been old news in the United States, where the New Yorker’s equivalent… Read more
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nikolai Leskov - review
Though underestimated in the English-speaking world, Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian writers. Donald Rayfield has described him as ‘Russia’s best-kept secret’. Richard Pevear’s excellent introduction… Read more
A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré - review
John Le Carré is one of a select group of novelists whose vivid and internally coherent imaginative worlds are so recognisable that their names have become adjectives — Dickensian, Wodehousian, … Read more
'The Infatuations', by Javier Marías - review
A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day… Read more
The Childhood of Jesus', by J.M. Coetzee - review
Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of… Read more
'Mimi', by Lucy Ellmann - review
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison… Read more
Straying from the Way
No sensible writer wastes good material. A couple of years ago Tim Parks published a memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still, a tale of chronic, debilitating back pain that appeared… Read more
Recent crime novels
William Brodrick’s crime novels have the great (and unusual) merit of being unlike anyone else’s, not least because his series hero, Brother Anselm, is a Gray’s Inn barrister turned Suffolk… Read more
Doctor in distress
It is winter 1936. Every weekday morning a group of young people travel by train from Ferrara, their home city, to Bologna where they are studying at the university. Theirs… Read more
Latest blogs
- Obama’s Berlin speech was a damp squib Freddy Gray
- PMQs sketch: In which Labour join the coalition Lloyd Evans
- Michael Gove kindly warns Stephen Twigg: people think you’re weak Isabel Hardman
- ‘Jihad!’ Douglas Murray
- The Tories are still flummoxed by social media Isabel Hardman
- The Supreme Court Mothballs the British Army Alex Massie
- Ed Miliband’s negative approach at PMQs looks set to become the norm James Forsyth
