Mia Levitin

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell. It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But

We are in the midst of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Not since the 1950s and early 1960s has there been so much interest in researching the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. The FDA approved a ketamine derivative for medicinal use in 2019, and has given both MDMA and psilocybin (the psycho-active ingredient in magic mushrooms) ‘breakthrough therapy’

‘I believe it’s the writer’s job to force the reader to look where they usually avoid looking,’ Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has said. The Wolf Hunt, her fourth novel translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, shines a light on racial tensions in America. Israeli-born Lilach and Mikhael Shuster live in Silicon Valley with their 16-year-old son

The cover image of Tessa Hadley’s fourth short story collection is Gerhard Richter’s ‘Betty’ (1988), a portrait of the artist’s daughter facing away from the viewer. It’s an apt choice for Hadley’s work, which turns on the fundamental unknowability of human beings. The titular tale, about a widowed mother and her two daughters confronting reduced

In July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old architecture student, was strangled to death at her home in a borough of Mexico City. Her suspected killer, Ángel González Ramos, an ex-boyfriend, fled and remained at large. Three decades later, buttressed by a movement protesting against violence towards women, her sister returned to Mexico in the

In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving

Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. That book tracked Lucy’s growing friendship with her first husband, William, after the death of her second. In Lucy by the Sea, she accompanies William to Maine to ride out the pandemic. Closing the door

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned ‘a deep and undeniable brown’. Unrecognisable to his entourage, he first confesses his predicament to Oona, an old friend and new lover. Similar metamorphoses begin to be reported throughout the country and violence ensues as

In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif Batuman returns to Harvard to follow her protagonist Selin during her sophomore year. Selin has spent the summer of 1996 teaching English in Hungary, trailing her friend Ivan. Her crush on him remains unrequited and

We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles out of the gate have been in capable hands. Zadie Smith reflected on lockdown in Intimations, a slim volume of personal essays; the virus featured in Ali Smith’s Orwell Prize-winning Summer; and Sarah Moss imagines

Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads.

Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social history and condition report of the New Orleans neighbourhood in which she grew up. The youngest of 12 children in a blended household, Broom was born

‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag survivor. Sentenced to hard labour for Trotskyist activities, Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, primarily in Kolyma, located at the edge of the Arctic Circle, eight time zones east of Moscow and ‘one of