Philip Hensher There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life
The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and
Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving
One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and
Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the
People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk at bus stops ridiculing the ‘new pence’ of decimal currency. Students no longer care about Vietnam. Retired wing commanders have finally stopped writing to the newspapers about the misuse of that fine old English word
‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of
During the years between school and my first job on a newspaper I worked briefly in Paris in an antique shop in the septième, owned by an ancient White Russian who had fled Petrograd at the end of 1917. She was a charming old woman, impeccably turned out and with beautiful manners. She was prone
In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. He not only tells a Dylan biography in seven songs but creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America, as well
Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of those travellers who came to London in the 1950s from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia and other African countries, seeking education and prosperity, and found a new home. They now not only hold prominent positions in
Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years, she and her husband Moth, who suffers from a degenerative disease, set off on a courageous walk around the south-west of England in the hope of restoring his health and finding a new life. It
British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils. Bournville, his 14th novel, lacks the caustic verve of What a Carve Up! (1994) or the wistful charm of The Rotters’ Club
‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,’ is how Louise Glück closes her poem ‘Nostos’. The same sentiment guides Marigold and Rose, the latest book by the 2020 Nobel Prize winner and the poet’s first to be deemed ‘a fiction’. Marigold and Rose are babies – infant twin girls in
