Lee Langley is the author of ten novels and has written several film scripts and screenplays.
There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s novel has its own compelling voice, filled with the sound of water rushing, gushing, flowing, hammering on rooftops, falling in threads from the sky. Naples is drowning, disintegrating, battered by relentless rain. Buildings collapse; huge
Driving across Japan’s Shikuko island, the food and travel writer Michael Booth pulls into a filling station to find, alongside the fizzy drinks and chewing gum, ‘vacuum-packed octopus beaks’. Who could resist? Not Booth. ‘Very crunchy,’ he reports. ‘And not in a good way.’ Booth is drawn to the offbeat, and The Meaning of Rice
In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no porridge or bed-testing here: these are bears with a difference. Tawada has form in animal-linked fiction: The Bridegroom Was a Dog won a major Japanese award. Writing in Japanese and German, she is a prizewinner
We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window onto a wilder America — the far reaches of Montana, Alabama, Texas, Missouri… But to say his stories are about rural life would be like saying Moby-Dick is about whaling. Lauded by American critics and
A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which could be a signal of comedy to come; and indeed he strews his novel’s pages with punchlines — good, bad-taste and groan-worthy. But this is gallows humour at its darkest: Grossman beckons us into a
Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes — and that’s just the format, before you get to the content, which might include fractured grammar, reversed chronology, parallel plots, contradictory footnotes, dead or unborn narrators and labyrinthine
We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’ been a contender!’ in On the Waterfront still resonates — but I have a problem with heroic thickos: Othello, so easily duped; purblind Lear… So I’m ambivalent about the leading character in the new novel
When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling it ‘crap’ and the award a disgrace. A columnist counted the number of ‘fucks’ — apparently 4,000. This was 1994 and savage Glaswegian vernacular replete with rhythmic obscenities was terra incognita to English readers. Kelman
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ — plunges 15-year-old Lizzie Vogel into the turmoil of Paradise Lodge, a local old people’s home: I didn’t want another year of trying to cheat the vending machine, relying on handouts and lifts and third-hand information,
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child, an abandoned wife, a missing mother… The Bones of Grace has a narrative as fragmented as a scattered jigsaw, initially puzzling, with seemingly disparate stories slowly coming together one by one, until the moment a
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is — as ever — that of Proust. The visiting and revisiting of the past; the dwelling on the minutiae of memory; the attention to social hierarchy, the demands of lust and the force of cruelty —
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed, your second is shortlisted for the Man Booker and your next collection of stories goes straight to No.1 in the New York Times bestseller list, while prizes and honours are showered on you. Might the
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In this new volume of stories from the American writer Ken Kalfus no one, innocent or guilty, can be counted safe. The novella which gives this collection its title is an audacious fictional riff on a
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came the soufflé of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter with its mischievous nod to TV soaps, followed by The Feast of the Goat, a searing portrait of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. Sixteen novels on, The
On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway fragments, is a picture of Algeria’s chequered past and present; a history of conquest and occupation. It’s a sugar-coated pill with a burning, bitter core. Boualem Sansal is an Algerian writer recently nominated for the
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary Hampstead family observed in all its turbulence by the teenage Stibbe, working as the nanny. Written as letters home to her sister, Love, Nina won over fellow writers and critics; reviews spoke of a quirky,
Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in small things. Pushkin Press has a track record for bringing foreign language works, classic and contemporary, to a British readership, and with this pocket-sized, elegant duo they celebrate a modern Japanese master virtually unknown here.
There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up serious spoiler alerts. The story demands an innocent eye; the gaining of knowledge should come page by page, and not be hurried. To set the scene: Shimura-san, a bachelor of 56, set in his ways,
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic novel, grandiose futuristic visions are being floated: in a city desperate to reinvent itself for today’s brave new world, ancient temples and palaces are no longer enough. With India’s space programme about to send a
