Fiction

Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the critical success of Hawthorn & Child, he retired from writing, telling his publishers he was done with making up stories. He also stopped reading — although only for a year, lured back by the likes of Muriel Spark and Georges Simenon’s Maigret series. Reading made him want to write again. The result is A Shock, a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths. The composite form, popular with the

Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet life. Freddy Otash breaks legs for Frank Sinatra. He gets Dean Martin’s pregnant Latina maid deported. He sticks the hand of someone blackmailing Liberace into a deep-fat fryer. He sleeps with the 21-year-old Elizabeth Taylor while she’s only on her second marriage. And all that’s in the first 20 pages, while Otash is still an LA cop. Once he goes freelance as a private eye, things turn rather more lurid. Widespread Panic is a rare stand-alone novel among Ellroy’s assorted trilogies and quartets. But, as you can maybe tell already,

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention. The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived

‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing sound in the solar system?’ Although this observation was made by Chips Channon at Sandwich after the rigours of electioneering in 1935 it could be aptly cited in this novel by the radiation physicist Agustín Fernández Mallo. These past 15 years he has evolved a method in which, owing something to Borges and perhaps early Nicholson Baker, troubled narrators’ outlandish events draw seamlessly upon everything around them; on the page, advertising hoardings, the screen or mind, these fragments are shored against their ruins, catching our world in its present flux.

Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not the pared-down parables and ironies of his self-exiled compatriot (and Nobel laureate) Herta Müller, but a rainbow-hued riot of fantasy, imagination and invention. The gender-switching narrator of ‘The Twins’ — one of five linked tales that make up Nostalgia — urges his lover to remember that ‘under the obscene rococo of our world and flesh, our bones are gothic and our spirit is gothic’. That feels about right, although Cartarescu fills his grotesque and hallucinatory scenes with tropical warmth, colour and light on top of the sepulchral chills of old

Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a computer scientist, Asha Ray, the narrator of The Startup Wife, her charismatic husband Cyrus and best friend Jules are nervously pitching their app platform — Asha’s cutting-edge algorithm aimed at people yearning for ritual without religion. Drawing on dreams, obsessions and secret desires — an Odyssey wedding, Game of Thrones funeral, pharaonic celebration — the app will create micro-communities of users; a virtual parish. Their startup gets the crucial nod, and they join the cool, shiny Utopians who are pursuing projects to support humanity ‘when there’s nothing left’. ‘You’re planning

At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in a particular author’s work to say? (For one of Irvine Welsh’s, a single word of four letters might be enough.) In the case of Patrick McGrath, I’d suggest, the answer comes on page 55 of his new novel: ‘I confess I feel that my sanity is under threat.’ McGrath famously grew up in the grounds of Broadmoor, where his father was the medical superintendent, and his consequent lifelong interest in psychiatry is reflected in pretty much all of his fiction. As a rule, if you’re a McGrath protagonist, you’re likely

Lisa McInerney likes the rule of three. Three novels set in Cork structured around sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and, within that, ‘smoke, coke and yokes [ecstasy], St Paddy’s modern trinity’. The Rules of Revelation follows her debut, The Glorious Heresies (winner of the 2016 Women’s Prize; in its focus on the relationship between teenagers Ryan and Karine, it represents the sex component) and its sequel, The Blood Miracles (drugs, 2017). It reprises Glorious Heresies’ movement between multiple characters, Ryan Cusack (centre of Blood Miracles) seen through them. Ryan has returned to Cork, where bad blood waits for him, barely congealed and threatening, darkly, to ooze out at any moment. Ostensibly