Emily Rhodes

Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This story began with a picture of a boy in a newspaper. That boy was Raymond Buys and he’d been killed in a camp not unlike New Dawn. He was just 15. This book is dedicated

Near the start of Fleur Jaeggy’s extraordinary novel Proleterka, the unnamed narrator reflects: ‘Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold.’ Passionate and cold is also an apt description of Jaeggy’s writing: the fierceness of her words erupts from the seams of her tiny,

Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral when the New Yorker printed it in December 2017, becoming the second most read article published by the magazine that year. Told in an apparently simple, confessional voice, it recounts 20-year-old Margot’s courtship with

All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the corn fields are ‘acres of gold like bullion, strewn with the sapphires of cornflowers and the garnets of corn poppies and watched over from on high by larks’. Our narrator, 14-year-old Edie, has finished school

Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her first novel, Crudo, is every bit as intelligent and provocative, with a roar of energy that comes from having been written, remarkably, in just seven weeks. Perhaps the novel’s most

Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in Paris. Her passion for French literature led her to open the first French bookshop in Berlin in 1921, a resounding success in spite of the predominantly Francophobe sentiment in Germany following the first world war.

Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The Trojan Flea’ is scrawled across X-ray screens; ‘I am so full of your death I can now only breathe your rot’ on a stairwell; and, on a dead body, ‘cut into the flesh with a

‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest …’ Like the author, this character is called Nicole, lives in Brooklyn, and is a

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a film in the 1960s — champagne, drugs, threesomes, gangsters, a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, hula-hooping girls and Pucci scarves flung over smears of vomit. Underneath, however, lies an intellectual question. The film is an adaptation of

Jon McGregor’s first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise inclusion on the 2002 Booker longlist that went on to win the Somerset Maugham and Betty Task Awards, captured 24 hours in the life of a suburban street. Fifteen years later, his fourth novel, Reservoir 13, has a similarly concentrated focus, but this

A preoccupation with death is felt from the start of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, which opens with Francesca Stubbs, in her seventies, considering whether her last words will be ‘you bloody old fool’ or ‘you fucking idiot’. Fran is central to the web of characters that populate the book, linked by varying degrees of friendship

Madeleine Thien’s third novel, recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, begins in Vancouver with Marie, who, like the author, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to Canada. Marie tells us that her father committed suicide in 1989 and that, soon after, the 19-year-old Ai-ming — whose father knew Marie’s father — came to stay,

With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’, Kitty Finch swam naked into view in Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. Similarly, in Hot Milk, Sofia Papastergiadis loves to swim —as, indeed, does Levy herself. Only, whereas Kitty swims up and down the gravelike