Andrea Long Chu is the poster girl critic of the American progressive left. Writing primarily for New York magazine, she made her name with takedowns of celebrated novelists such as Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reviews that ‘scrutinise authors as well as their
Martin MacInnes’s third novel, In Ascension, is a literary sci-fi epic set in the 2030s. It centres on a Dutch marine microbiologist called Leigh Hasenboch. As a child she suffers from a violent, frustrated father and a distant, unavailable mother, and tries to protect her younger sister from the worst of it. One day, swimming
It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St. John Mandel has a claim to fictionalised outbreaks. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven presciently envisioned a devastating flu. That book was televised by HBO and became a major hit, and this latest touches on the
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp in 2007, when the critic James Wood had declared in favour of realism, and Steven Hall published his debut, The Raw Shark Texts. It was a British metafictional novel that created a big splash. Noted
It’s 1981 in Richmond, south-west London. Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is called out to a rundown house where the octogenarian Leonard Graves has killed himself. There’s vodka, pills, a cut on his arm and a note in his pocket to a woman called Adeline. But who is she? Searching the house, Hobbes and his sergeant,
