‘Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.’ R.F. Kuang’s latest novel is a promising adventure story full of magic and maths but let down by florid prose. When Alice Law, an American postgraduate student of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, learns of the death of her chauvinist thesis supervisor Professor
‘The first thing I did after waking up was grab his cock – stiff with sleep – and hold still, as if hanging on to a branch.’ The opening of Annie Ernaux’s essay might suggest that the ‘possession’ of the title is of a husband’s penis. But after our nameless protagonist leaves ‘W’, her husband
Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a
Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In
Creation Lake, by the American author Rachel Kushner, is a dazzling, genre-defying novel, satirical yet profound. In her 2018 novel The Mars Room, Kushner took us inside the US prison system and eviscerated it. Here she goes back a decade, as well as 40,000 years, interweaving into the main plot notes on the extinction of
The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a
Zip up Heathcliff in Gore-Tex, give Cathy laugh-out-loud lines, fold in the poignancy of E.M. Forster, embed quaint maps, blisters, a dash of existential terror and heaps of heartache and you have David Nicholls’s latest novel. If Nicholls’s One Day (recently adapted for Netflix) is a bildungsroman, then You Are Here explores learning to love
Who are you without memory? This is the question that sits at the heart of The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, best known for her 1988 novella Kitchen, which was a smash hit in Japan and adapted for film. The Premonition is a similarly slender work and one that casts a delicate spell. Nineteen-year-old Yayoi has
To sleep or not to sleep – that is the question the French writer Marie Darrieussecq asks in her latest book, which explores the insomnia that has haunted her for 20 years since the birth of her first child. From that date, she writes, it ‘has attached itself to me like a small ghost’. Darrieussecq
Rachel Ingalls might just be the best writer of the late 20th century you’ve never heard of. Born in Boston in 1940 (her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard), Ingalls dropped out of school and studied in Germany before winning a place at Radcliffe College. Shakespeare’s quadricentennial drew her to London and in
In Johanne Lykke Holm’s neo-gothic novel Strega, Rafaela, claustrophobic in her parents’ ‘yellow’ and ‘dusty’ flat, dreams of working as a maid at the mountain-nestled Olympic Hotel. She luxuriates in a bath with a brochure, mesmerised by photographs of ‘girls in pearl-white aprons, girls eating ruby-red apples straight from the tree’. It’s a foreshadowing of
In 1973, in White Plains, New York, Donna Freed was told, in a ‘shroud of shame’ and without any soothing explanations, that she was adopted. The six-year-old’s life was plunged into a dark hinterland of anxiety. Freed spent the next 38 years fearful that the discovery of her birth mother would reveal ‘a terrible or
The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his polygamous ways. But in the counterculture today, polyamorists face less of a physical threat and more of a metaphysical one, as chronicled by the journalist Rachel Krantz in her tortured book Open: An Uncensored Memoir
