Fiction

The Guardian notes that Ladbrokes and William Hill share Philip Hensher’s hunch for the Booker shortlist, which is to be unveiled next week. ‘Hunch’ isn’t the right word. Hensher wrote in these pages a fortnight ago: ‘The shortlist should comprise McCann, Tóibín, Mendelson, Crace, House and Catton. House’s novel is the one you ought to read, and Mendelson’s the one that everyone will read and love. The prize will go to Crace.’ For the record then, Hensher’s shortlist would be: TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson, Harvest by Jim Crace, The Kills by Richard House and The Luminaries by Eleanor

It may be that only geological erosion, expected to occur sometime over the next ten million years, will finally remove Gibraltar as a source of friction between Britain and Spain. In the meantime, with a poll showing that nearly two thirds of Spaniards support their government’s current tough line on the territory, David Cameron has again reassured the Rock’s chief minister Fabian Picardo that Britain will always stand up for Gibraltar and safeguard the interests of its people. But while the tension is real and enduring, there is no suggestion on either side that the situation might be resolved by force. Seventy-three years ago, in the autumn of 1940, the

It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom the married Shelley had eloped two years previously, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress. The weather was terrible that year – so bad they called it ‘the ‘year without a summer’ – and the party spent most of their time indoors, gathered about the fireplace in Lord Byron’s drawing-room. And it was there,

The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her career, she has sold her mother’s house in Sussex and bought a scruffy old canal boat called Chaplin & Company, currently moored in Little Venice. In the flashbacks that follow, we learn about Odeline’s miserable childhood — albeit lit up by a few eureka moments — along with the history of her new floating home

Nobody wants to go mad. We try to live healthy lives so that we won’t die slowly of lung cancer or quickly from a heart attack. But what we let ourselves worry about less – because there is so little we can do to protect against it – is living long enough to have our minds cruelly betray us, leaving us trapped in bodies that still work but in a world that no longer makes sense. In Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom dementia has become an infectious disease amongst the elderly, with every patient who checks into a certain Manhattan clinic developing what “the hospital’s spokesperson, for lack of a

In Charlie Kauffman’s Bafta lecture (a startlingly honest reflection on film writing, and well worth a listen), the screenwriter, producer and director stresses that it is of the utmost importance, when embarking on a screenplay, to write something that could only be portrayed in the form of a film, and in no other medium. He is, of course, right: for writing a screenplay, in a purely technical sense, is different and distinct from writing in its other forms. You rarely have authorial narrative and do not overly embellish with descriptions. Rather, you must distil the essence of the piece into dialogue and action. You must then describe the visual world

The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help explain why his new one avoids invention wherever it can squeeze interest out of such stony matters of record as team sheets and attendance figures. Red or Dead follows the legendary manager Bill Shankly from his arrival at Liverpool — second-division stragglers in 1959 — to his death in 1981, seven years after retirement, having built a league-winning team that went on to rule Europe. Seldom does a novel, dedicated at such length to a single life, venture so scarcely into the mind of its subject; the gamble is that

In Times of Fading Light’s seven narrators exist in an almost permanent state of bewildered disappointment. Given that the narrators are various generations of the same family, what we’re shown is youthful hope turning recurrently to despair. The story begins in Berlin with Alexander, who is dying, visiting his now demented father, Kurt. This is 2001 and Kurt is at the end of his life, speechless and largely uncomprehending. Alexander, meanwhile, plans to elope to Mexico where his grandparents lived in exile almost 50 years previously. Walking his father through the streets of Berlin, he measures everything against the world he’d known before the fall of the Wall: ‘That was

When you walk into a new branch library, or stumble across an unfamiliar secondhand bookshop, which writer do you look for? They can’t be too obscure; the idea is to find something. They must be prolific; you’re looking for something that’s new to you. And they must be reliable: you want to be sure that your discovery will be worth your time. The classic answer is PG Wodehouse. Mine has always been Elmore Leonard. Leonard, whose death was announced today, was a consummate professional pleasure-giver. More than 40 novels over more than 50 years: first westerns, then crime, standard consistently high. His spare style was impressive enough to win both

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work. It is regrettable that her book Office Wives — a collection of stories about women in business —

Ballistics is the debut novel from D W Wilson. It playfully and interestingly twists and pulls at the heart of what we understand about human relationships. This is rural Canada, where men are men and Hemingway is a sissy. These are the blue-collar workers of Bruce Springsteen and no problem is too small not to be solved by increased muscle, increased drinking or, failing that, the ballistics of the title. Yet, underlying the bravado and occasionally excessive butch depictions of butch life, this is a subtle novel. For example, we are repeatedly told that Cecil West, the grandfather at its heart, is an unreconstructed male and that it’s ‘a hell

One of the givens in detective fiction these days is that the sleuth should be deeply flawed. You almost expect, as you pry open the pages of the latest overnight sensation  to discover that the inspector in question is an internet troll who gets in fights at closing time and closes his eyes to the excesses of the English Defence League while somehow remaining sympathetic and miles better than his boss, who imagines that proper procedure and pins in the board are the way to solve crime. It would be stretching things, even so, to imagine that we might get behind a Berlin detective – known as a ‘bull’ –

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He first came to prominence with his debut novel The Commitments, which he self-published in Ireland in 1987. The book was then published in the UK in 1988 by William Heinemann. The two books which followed, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), completed his Barrytown Trilogy. All three books were subsequently made into extremely successful films. In 1993 Doyle won the Booker Prize for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The book was praised for Doyle’s ability to write convincingly in the idiom of his main protagonist, Paddy Clarke: a ten-year-old boy residing in Dublin in the 1960s. Doyle’s popularity

For over two millennia, the writings of Plato had been at the very core of a Western education. Yet  by the dawn of the 21st century, Plato appeared marginalized to the benign pedantry of Classics departments — engagement with his ideas having been spurned by many philosophers and educators over the preceding decades. To many his call to search for truth — and to live according to it — is no longer seen as applicable to our relativistic age. Neel Burton’s Plato: Letters to My Son attempts to rescue Plato from irrelevance and guide another generation of readers and leaders along the path of self-knowledge. To understand the thrill of Burton’s timely intervention,