Fiction

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades. The result was Sell Us the Rope (2022), his sixth novel, which imagined what Koba, the Georgian then better known as Joseph Dzhugashvili, got up to in 1907 while attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. May mixed the real with

In James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, Don Lamb, a Cambridge art historian, expressed outrage when ‘Sick Bed’, a Tracey Emin-like installation, is erected in the college quad. It is tempting to imagine what Lamb would now make of the many artworks on display in The Violet Hour. Here, Cahill steps away from the rarefied world of academia and public galleries to expose the excesses of the international art market. At the centre of the book’s many strands is Thomas Haller, whose violet-coloured panels partially inspire the title. He is a world-renowned artist who, in the words of his erstwhile best friend and dealer, Lorna Bedford, has become ‘the moneyed

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing

Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life.  The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966. Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger. He enjoys his work, but he’s 31 and restless. He finds himself casting a speculative eye at the café on

Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho Black took a satirical poke at the film world, while Spanky set a sexy demon loose in London. More novels, many collections of short stories and three memoirs followed. The millennium saw a switch to crime fiction, with Full Dark House, which introduced his elderly detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May, of London’s Peculiar

Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 – far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500. Thad and Hazan, aged 27 and 26 respectively, are in serious debt after their father’s recent death, and their roof is leaking. Logging in the Montana backcountry is

Occasionally a book is published, perhaps twice in a generation, which is so bad but internationally celebrated that one questions everything one has believed about literature. The Wizard of the Kremlin, written in French by the Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Roman in 2022. It narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Booker, and has since been translated into 30 languages. If a novel this inept is so successful then we have truly entered Spenglerian end times. The book is not just poorly constructed, filled with two-dimensional characters, tin-eared dialogue and inauthentic settings. Its very premise is ridiculous. The

I probably won’t be the only one to say this of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection: it made me feel seen, and not in a good way. The novel takes aim at aspects of modern life, from social media to remote working and interior design trends, that aren’t obvious subjects for serious literary attention. Latronico, a philosopher who writes in Italian (this is his first novel to appear in English), suggests that our online profiles and material possessions have taken the place of integrity and community in society. He makes you question whether there can still be such a thing as an authentic personality. The narrative follows a couple whose existence is,

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has