Book Reviews

Family history is all the rage at the moment — finding out about one’s ancestors, digging back into one’s roots. Sofka Zinovieff has written the strange, and strangely moving, tale of her family’s unorthodox relationships. By turns comical, tragicomical and melodramatic, her book often reads much like fiction, and she recounts it like a novel. The principal characters are: Gerald Berners, born in 1883; his lover, nicknamed the ‘Mad Boy’, Robert Heber-Percy, born in 1911; the author’s grandmother, Jennifer Fry, born in 1916; and the author herself, born in 1961. Zinovieff expertly interweaves their unlikely history from late Victorian England until the present day, leaving the reader on the last

As we become steadily accustomed to life in the Age of Celebrity, it’s become a truth that, as Mark Mason put it in the Speccie last month, ‘meeting your heroes is almost always a bad idea’. Reading the letters page in the London Review of Books, it seems that this advice extends to visiting any place associated with your heroes. Last summer Max Long, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, arrived at Patrick Leigh Fermor’s old house at Kardamyli in Greece, hoping to pay homage to one of his heroes. His visit, he reports, was unideal: ‘To the hairy, shirtless, sandalled old man who occupied Paddy’s studio as though he

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has been running in London theatres for 62 years straight – a period that spans more than 25,000 performances. As is traditional in the genre, it ends with the suspects gathered together for a shocking denouement, during which the detective unmasks the murderer, to general horror. Despite the number of times this has happened, the identity of the killer is apparently ‘the best-kept secret in show business’; at no point has any reviewer felt the need to reveal that the butler did it. On the other hand, the publication last week of two autobiographies – one by Kevin Pietersen and one by Roy Keane – were treated quite

Dim the lights, half-muffle the bells, replace your Hatchard’s bookmark with a strip of black crepe: the novel is dead. Again. Will Self broke the news in last Saturday’s Guardian, proclaiming in characteristically sepulchral tones that ‘our literary culture is sealed’. He has form in this regard: this latest article follows another Guardian piece in May this year whose headline assures us that ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)’, and will presumably be followed by ‘The novel has ceased to be’, ‘Bereft of life, the novel rests in peace’, and ‘The novel has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined

Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for 20 years. Douglas Petersen, the anally retentive middle-aged narrator, never feels like an equal to Connie, his attractive and witty wife. On the opening page, Connie tells him that she thinks she wants to leave him when their son Albie goes off to university. But first they are to take a long-planned family holiday — a Grand Tour of the great cities of Europe. Douglas sees this as his last chance to save his marriage, and also to rebuild his broken relationship with Albie. In an introduction, Nicholls explains that