This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better for this to happen than in Northern Ireland? At the Day’s End pub ‘two eejits in Halloween masks’ enter the bar; ‘Trick or treat,’ they shout. ‘Fut-fut-fut-fut went the gun.’ A woman screams, ‘then a
Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist religious autocracy, is portrayed as being totally intolerant of free-thinkers. This is a powerful satire on an Islamist dictatorship. It is unsurprising that Sansal’s writings are censored in his native Algeria. The religious structure of
Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after reading the first quarter. It seems to be a dreary saga about three generations of the Tye family. The background is of an intellectual, comfortably off, left-wing family from a milieu in which Polly Toynbee
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist who knows how the mind is tortured by deception, infidelity, obfuscation, suspicion and sex. Eitan Green is a neurosurgeon who, exhilaratedly driving his SUV at speed on the desert tracks outside Beersheba, runs down an
