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…
Women in the various hells of Algiers
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
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
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?
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
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
'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…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
Wool of bat and lizard leg
When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth.
Living dolls
Born in Japan, growing up in America in the Sixties, Yoko Kawaguchi was perplexed by the persistence of what she felt to be an anachronistic image of Japanese culture: the geisha.
Indian snakes and ladders
Award-winning poet Ruth Padel established her prose credentials with her autobiographical travel book, Tigers in Red Weather.
Beyond the guidebook
Between the Assassinations is to summer reading what Slum-dog Millionaire was to feelgood movies: the book, like the film, beneath…
Sounding a different note
Midsummer Nights, edited by Jeanette Winterson
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