Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
A Mojave desert mystery: The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, reviewed
Late one night, on a dimly lit stretch of highway in a small town in the Californian Mojave desert, an…
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…
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…
Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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
A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which…
The novel as examination paper: experimental fiction reaches new extremes
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
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
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
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
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…
Javier Marías's Thus Bad Begins: A touch of Vertigo in post-Franco Madrid
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
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
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
Social comedy Peruvian-style
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
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