fiction
Matthew Wright
Novelist Jonathan Coe has, for some time, been assuming the role of an Evelyn Waugh of the left. Brilliant early comedies about education, journalism, and power have made way for longer, deeper, but arguably somewhat lugubrious, almost mystical investigations into lost, neglected people and places. With The Broken Mirror, Coe revisits many of these themes, but in the form of a tiny, poignant, crystalline fable.One of the most distinctive – and, in my view, valuable – aspects of Coe’s novels has always been a willingness to take on specific, practical political issues. In the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At first glance, Susie Boyt’s sixth novel seems in danger of echoing her half-sister Esther Freud’s Lucky Break, another story about actors. But how unfair – of course Love and Fame has its own distinctive, witty brilliance. Eve Swift comes from an acting dynasty but she is a failed thespian after nerves – “She’s as highly strung as a violin factory” – force her to pull out of playing Nina in The Seagull. For four weeks of rehearsals she doesn’t eat, apart from monkey nuts, or sleep. At first the intensity of her performance works – “You do lost so well, Eve” – but then it Read more ...
Katherine Waters
La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port Meadow, north of Oxford. Here all kinds drink: scholars, labourers, watermen; gossip and taunts are exchanged over the bar; peacocks stalk the river terrace, haranguing customers to privilege them with snacks.Our hero is Malcolm, son of Mr and Mrs Polstead who run the inn. He helps with the food service, eavesdrops scholarly (and non-scholarly) conversations, and nurses a long-running feud frozen to silence with the Read more ...
David Nice
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb performances, in the monologue sequence Queers, surely due a second series. Now it's the turn of one of our greatest novelists - no need to add the qualifying "on gay subjects" - to make even richer work than Queers of stimulating our imaginations by leaving us to fill in the gaps."The Sparsholt Affair" is the big, offstage crisis at the heart of Alan Hollinghurst's dance to the music of time, his pictures at an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as Turkey’s Nobel laureate told me during a Southbank Centre interview last month, he never set out to appropriate his home town as a sort of personal brand: it was simply the beloved backdrop of his childhood and youth. These days, he sometimes feels annoyed when critics harp on about the ineffable melancholy and nostalgia (hüzün is the Turkish word) that haunts his depictions of the picturesque old imperial capital that has Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the Third Reich had stuck to a non-aggression pact with Britain and expanded unopposed into the lebensraum of the Soviet Union. One founding fact of the thriller was that at Munich in September 1938, Britain and Germany made a commitment to peace in our time.That infamous piece of paper has lured Harris back to Nazi Germany after 25 years. This time he Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The sixth in a series of crime novels that began in 2011 with Or the Bull Kills You and which introduced readers to Chief Inspector Max Cámara, Fatal Sunset opens with our anarchistic hero summoned to see Rita Hernández, newly installed Commissioner of Valencia’s Policia Nacional.Officious, devoutly Catholic and eager to make her mark, clearing up the financial and administrative mess bequeathed to her by her (male) predecessor, Hernández is determined to fix the “insolent” Cámara and his sidekick Torres once and for all, to belittle him sufficiently that he leaves the Jefatura. Sacking him Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I knew I wanted to write a thriller about mental illness through the eyes of a young woman whose family had been defined by it; someone fascinating and fragile and brittle who’d been forced to grow up too fast. I knew I wanted to tap into the period immediately after leaving university, when everything feels possible in both the best and the worst way. And most of all, I knew that I wanted to tell a female coming-of-age story that was more about a psychological struggle than a sexual Read more ...
Lisa Jewell
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a controlling man who’d kept me more or less locked away from the world. I had no front door key, no phone, was not allowed to see my friends or my family. If I displeased him I was subjected to week-long silences and constant criticism. I finally broke away from the marriage early that same year and desperately wanted to purge the experience by writing about it. I was a few paragraphs into a fictionalised account of the events when I suddenly recoiled. I wasn’t ready. It was too personal. Too Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow featured a half-Inuit woman whose suspicion over a young neighbour’s death in Copenhagen lures her from Denmark back to Greenland. There was a film made in English by Bille August starring Julia Ormond, but Høeg, who is now 60, has hardly flooded the market since. The Susan Effect is only his fifth novel since 1992.Miss Smilla was a globe-trotting precursor to Nordic noir, softening us all up for the amped-up stories of skulduggery in the senior echelons of the Danish Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...