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Lee Langley

Credit Getty Images

A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed

Lee Langley 10 November 2018 9:00 am

You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…

Secrets and lies: Berta Isla, by Javier Marías, reviewed

Lee Langley 13 October 2018 9:00 am

A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most…

Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed

Lee Langley 4 August 2018 9:00 am

A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house…

Portrait of an American childhood: A Long Island Story by Rick Gekoski reviewed

Lee Langley 28 July 2018 9:00 am

Success as a rare books dealer, academic, publisher, broadcaster and author of several non-fiction books — at 70, Rick Gekoski…

A single mother hits rock bottom in Tokyo: Territory of Light reviewed

Lee Langley 28 April 2018 9:00 am

Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the…

Naples drowns in deluge and corruption

Lee Langley 2 December 2017 9:00 am

There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s…

Has sushi become the new chicken tikka masala?

Lee Langley 7 October 2017 9:00 am

Driving across Japan’s Shikuko island, the food and travel writer Michael Booth pulls into a filling station to find, alongside…

A story of three bears — and what it means to be human

Lee Langley 25 March 2017 9:00 am

In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no…

Love and loss in America’s wide open spaces

Lee Langley 4 February 2017 9:00 am

We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window…

Gallows humour is at its darkest in David Grossman’s latest novel

Lee Langley 26 November 2016 9:00 am

A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which…

ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA

The novel as examination paper: experimental fiction reaches new extremes

Lee Langley 15 October 2016 9:00 am

Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction…

The Angels Die spares no punches

Lee Langley 13 August 2016 9:00 am

We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’…

James Kelman plays Memphis

Lee Langley 9 July 2016 9:00 am

When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling…

Chaos among the commodes in Nina Stibbe’s old folks’ home

Lee Langley 28 May 2016 9:00 am

A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…

Losers in the game of life

Lee Langley 7 May 2016 9:00 am

Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…

Author Javier Marias (Photo: Getty)

Javier Marías's Thus Bad Begins: A touch of Vertigo in post-Franco Madrid

Lee Langley 27 February 2016 9:00 am

The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…

Jhumpa Lahiri's new tongue

Lee Langley 20 February 2016 9:00 am

Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…

John Lennon’s desert island luxury

Lee Langley 24 October 2015 9:00 am

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…

Author Ken Kalfus (Photo: Getty)

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter

Lee Langley 11 July 2015 9:00 am

Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…

Social comedy Peruvian-style

Lee Langley 25 April 2015 9:00 am

Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…

Women in the various hells of Algiers

Lee Langley 29 November 2014 9:00 am

On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway…

A novel that will make you want to call social services

Lee Langley 23 August 2014 9:00 am

Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…

A lost treasure of Japanese fiction – pocket-sized but world class

Lee Langley 17 May 2014 9:00 am

Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in…

Who’s raiding the fridge?

Lee Langley 3 May 2014 9:00 am

There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…

A Mughal Disneyland and a ripping yarn

Lee Langley 19 April 2014 9:00 am

Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…

1 2 »

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