Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

David Herman

Box of tricks: The Imposters, by Tom Rachman, reviewed

The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there are more and more back-references, adding to what we think we know about the characters, but also contributing to a sense of uncertainty that runs through the book. It begins simply enough. We meet an elderly couple, Dora Frenhofer, a novelist, and her partner Barry. Dora will become the central character. Her memory is going,

Anna Aslanyan

Lovable oddballs: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, by Andrey Kurkov, reviewed

The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and his friends, who have been gathering here since the 1970s to worship the musician, are now living in ‘a “double” past: another age and another country’. They know ‘time can’t be rewound like an old VHS tape’, and yet Alik keeps reminiscing about their Soviet days – a time when, despite everything, the whole town

Helen Parr

Could the bombing of Sir Galahad have been prevented?

The Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston is the most recognisable face of the Falklands war. He was terribly burnt when the Guards were bombed while waiting on the RFA Sir Galahad on 8 June 1982. He later became a national figure, talking openly about the difficulties of recovery, and working for burns victims and injured veterans. His portrait by Nicky Philipps hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. It was an honour the Guardsman would have preferred to avoid. The story of the Welsh Guards in the Falklands war is that of the bombing. It was the single biggest loss of British life in one episode in the Falklands, probably in the

Leyla Sanai

A shocking account of madness – and how it is treated in the US

The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with psychosis plummeted dramatically when he relapsed, with catastrophic results. Schizophrenia is terrifying for the sufferer, characterised as it is by a distortion of reality brought about through paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations. Those who wrinkle their noses and sneer ‘crazy’ need only gently press their closed eyelids to experience transient visual hallucinations of flashing lights.

Oliver-James Campbell

Reinhard Heydrich and the bugged Berlin brothel

Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations still shrouded in mystery. It is easy to see why. Right from the outset, the book’s authors, Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schramel, note that there are ‘practically no cast-iron sources for the events at Salon Kitty and the people who frequented it’. This is most likely why, after an introduction, the subject doesn’t

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Is there anything safe left to eat?

The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system to be doom-laden, but there has been something of an avalanche of them recently. Within the space of a couple of months we have had four, which may discuss different aspects of how our food is produced, but when it comes to the effects are as one: this is a manmade problem, and without serious

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Macabre allegories: No Love Lost, by Rachel Ingalls, reviewed

Rachel Ingalls might just be the best writer of the late 20th century you’ve never heard of. Born in Boston in 1940 (her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard), Ingalls dropped out of school and studied in Germany before winning a place at Radcliffe College. Shakespeare’s quadricentennial drew her to London and in 1965 she came for good, living in north London until her death, aged 78, in 2019. Ingalls has been praised by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Faber’s Charles Monteith described her as ‘a genius – not a word I use lightly’ and

Emily Rhodes

The Native American lore of Minnesota’s lakes and islands

Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive some islands as ‘books in themselves… You could think of the lakes as libraries.’ There is a productive tension between German logic and Native American spirituality in her refreshingly unusual take on the world: she calls herself a ‘mixed-blood’, born of a German-American father and French-Ojibwe mother. When considering the Ojibwe ritual of offering tobacco

Lynn Barber

How Britain prepared for Armageddon from the 1950s onwards

Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the nuclear heat, blackened fingers claw out from the rubble’ and was convinced this was really happening. ‘The experience scarred me for life,’ she declares, ‘and it is the reason you are reading this book.’ In her twenties, she suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia, so she decided to confront her fears by becoming a journalist specialising

Victor Sebestyen

The GDR was not the Stasiland of grey monotony we imagine

One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989.  There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of escape By 10.30 p.m., 20,000 people had massed in a narrow street, demanding to be allowed into the West, on the other side of the Wall – though at that crossing point the border was just a pair of gates. The mood was extraordinarily tense as the crowd became angrier.  Whenever Jäger asked for instructions

Jude Cook

The lady vanishes: Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, reviewed

‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone. Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the historian and translator Cecilia Berg, disappears without trace, leaving her publisher father Martin to bring up her and her brother Elis in a Gothenberg suburb. Fast-forward 15 years, and Martin is still living alone, visited by his children and haunted by Cecilia’s ghost. Despite the success of the publishing company begun with his teenage buddy

Horatio Clare

The life of an Exmoor stockman reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir

British nature is having a moment, thanks to David Attenborough’s Wild Isles (BBC One). As ever, spring brings a crop of new nature writing, but you are unlikely to come across anything like Once Upon a Raven’s Nest. This is the story of the life of an Exmoor man – Hedley Ralph Collard, known as Tommy – and it reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir. Fans of Niall Griffiths and Kevin Barry will bolt it down. But although the tale is told by Tommy, and rampages along like fiction, the book is actually a blend of reportage and imaginative truth constructed by Catrina Davies, who writes: ‘Where necessary I have put

Scott Bradfield

The tragically short life of Bruno Schulz – and his complicated legacy

This is the second excellent book by Benjamin Balint to consider the cross-cultural perils of being a great writer after you’re dead. His first, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, described legal battles over the residence of Kafka’s literary estate. This new one shifts the focus to a very different (and equally unusual) writer, Bruno Schulz, whose work has long been caught up in posthumous conflicts about who it most belongs to – that motley assembly of us selfish readers who actually read him, or those various governments competing to claim him as part of their national heritage. Schulz’s brief success preceded one of the most tragic

Kate Chisholm

The savage power of 18th-century caricature

Thanks to the work of the caricaturists of the late 18th century, the mistresses of the future George IV – Mrs Fitzherbert, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Lady Jersey among them – are better known to us than his eventual wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Prince of Wales’s decadent, spendthrift lifestyle (we see him emerging in 1788 from a lavish four-poster from which Mrs Fitzherbert arises en déshabillé), combined with his florid face and corpulent physique, were perfect fodder for this new genre of artistry, which used caricature (or visual exaggeration) to make political points. James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank were its chief proponents. Their high point was the

Jenny Colgan

A modern Cinderella story: Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Romance, and romantic comedy, make up a third of all novels sold – by far the highest-earning genre of fiction. They outdo crime novels 2:1. They are very rarely reviewed, and are generally excluded from year-end round ups, awards, gongs and TV book shows. They do not have their own festivals or celebrations; romance writers are extremely thin on the ground at Hay. They suffer from a triple bigotry (in an industry that likes to think itself terribly progressive): they are read by women; they are read by older women and they are read by working-class women. So it’s a landmark that the critically garlanded Curtis Sittenfeld is having a

Philip Hensher

The attraction of freethinking humanism

One rather surprising fact emerges from a history of humanism: most humanists were nice people. This might, on the surface, appear a totally fatuous observation. There is not much value in debating whether, say, architects, chancellors of the exchequer, engineers, surgeons or gardeners have been obviously nice people, and we would roll our eyes if a reviewer started speculating whether Wagner or Dickens were personally agreeable. But perhaps humanists are in a different category. The hostile divide between religion and free-thinking rose to a height in the mid-19th century There is little doubt that those writers and thinkers of the past who placed humanity rather than divinity at the centre

Monday

Suzi Feay

Magic and espionage: The Warlock Effect, by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, reviewed

When a shocking, plot-terminating event occurs almost halfway through The Warlock Effect, it’s not just the prospect of another 200 pages to go that alerts the reader to narrative trickery. The central character, Louis Warlock, is after all a stage illusionist who has already pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of mind-reading in front of a crowd of sceptics. Though Warlock likes to come across as a lone genius, behind his stunts lurks an invisible team of problem-crackers he dubs the Brains Trust. They include fellow magic- obsessive Dinah, a girlfriend he seems puzzlingly ambivalent about. The West End stages and cabaret clubs of 1950s Soho are swiftly swapped for

Paul Baker

Dazzling wordplay: Man-Eating Typewriter, by Richard Milward, reviewed

Imagine you work for a grubby Soho publishing company (the fictional Glass Eye Press) in the late 1960s and an unhinged anarchist gets in touch, offering to send you his memoirs which will detail how and why he will commit the crime of the century. Such is the premise of Richard Milward’s clever dark comedy, Man-Eating Typewriter. Coded messages are sprinkled throughout the book, with a faulty typewriter playing a key role The novel’s severely unreliable narrator is Raymond Marianne Novak, the son of a French surrealist (semi-affectionately called Madam Ovary), who is brought up in a war-damaged London squat. Novak is breathtakingly ugly, pansexual, a dab hand at the

Kate Womersley

Great men don’t shape history – but tiny microbes do

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself. Pathogenesis – the cause of disease, its development and the impact it has on cells and organisms – is thankfully not what Pathogenesis is about. Jonathan Kennedy

Anna Aslanyan

Michael Frayn remembers old friends – and the spy who duped him

Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on the arbitrary nature of both memory and creativity – and yet the way he treats them is anything but fickle. He remembers every one of them with fondness, never slipping into sentimentality or idealisation. These sober recollections are interlaced with the irony familiar from Frayn’s novels, while his playwright’s genius occasionally flashes in such lines