After Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra destroyed the majority of her letters. This act, often interpreted as an attempt to preserve Jane’s reputation, has had the opposite effect of fuelling fervent – at times prurient – speculation about what the letters contained. While Cassandra may simply have wished to shield her relatives from the
Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down
Before Brian Friel earned renown as a dramatist, he wrote short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. These were later published in two collections, A Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). Now ten of the stories, selected by Friel before his death in 2015, along with
In James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, Don Lamb, a Cambridge art historian, expressed outrage when ‘Sick Bed’, a Tracey Emin-like installation, is erected in the college quad. It is tempting to imagine what Lamb would now make of the many artworks on display in The Violet Hour. Here, Cahill steps away from the rarefied
Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’,
At the end of John Boyne’s novel Earth, Evan Keogh, a conscience-stricken young footballer, hands evidence of his connivance in a rape to the police. Two years earlier, he and his teammate Robbie had been found innocent of the charge by a jury, whose foreperson was Dr Freya Petrus. Freya, a consultant in a hospital
In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall.
Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg,
A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a
In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’ The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots
Who would have thought that the battle between champions of old-school socialism and contemporary identity politics for the post of General Secretary of Unify, a fictitious British trade union, would make for such riveting reading? Nayan Olak and Megha Sharma have little in common save their skin colour. He is the son of corner shopkeepers,
Should Alain de Botton ever require fictional evidence of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, he could do worse than to turn to Clara, the protagonist of Stéphane Carlier’s latest delightful novel. Clara is a hairdresser in a rather rundown provincial salon in France. She has a good relationship with her boss, Madame Habib, her
Seventy-three prisoners were condemned to death at the Old Bailey in 1835 at a time when there were more than 200 capital offences on the statute book. Nevertheless, all had their sentences commuted apart from two: James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted of ‘the detestable and abominable crime’ of sodomy. The indictment stated
The Appalachians have become fashionable fictional territory. Following Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Demon Copperhead comes Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch. Like Cold Mountain, it is set largely in the aftermath of the American civil war, but, for all its wealth of detail, it is less a historical account than
Quintus, an Ephesian slave, is in attendance on his master, Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman governor of Britain, when Cunicatus, the chief of one of many warring tribes in ‘this hideous island at the edge of the world’, seals a marriage alliance between Frontinus and his daughter, Olwen. She, however, rejects the match, escaping from
There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s
When 15-year-old Marianne Clifford tells her parents that she is in love with 18-year-old Simon Hurst, her mother dismisses it as a schoolgirl crush and her father tells her that she is far too young for a boyfriend and should concentrate on her own life ‘as befits a girl of your age and upbringing’. It
A recent YouGov survey found that 60 per cent of Britons dream of being writers, compared with 31 per cent who dream of being film stars. Although the chances of success, or even subsistence, are equally remote in both professions, aspirant authors flock to the country’s ever-proliferating creative writing courses. Miranda France’s splendid third book,
In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself. On New Year’s Eve he was taken
The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group. The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in
