The global disruption of 2020-21 posed a special challenge to novelists. As a subject it seems irresistible; but how to find order and pattern in a series of seemingly blank, eventless days? Stuck in the pandemic doldrums, Tim Parks’s elderly narrator at least has memories of the past and a richly stocked mind to call
In October 2017 the academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst went to see a neurologist in Oxford. A couple of months earlier a weird thing had happened: he’d gone on a long walk and ended it shuffling along, like an old man in slippers. He wasn’t yet 50. Having had a scan, he was looking forward to hearing
We all have our vision of a paradise travel destination. Mine was Tahiti, based on exotic remoteness and those pictures of glorious atolls with their cerulean blue lagoons – until I went there and discovered a severe underlying drugs problem among the island’s youth, and whispering discontent. Herman Melville once talked of how ‘the soul
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: not France in 1789, convulsed by revolution, but Britain in 1845, when the period Dickens referred to as ‘the moving age’ was in danger of spinning out of control. It was the year when the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in
In retrospective mood, just months before the stroke that killed him, Italo Calvino mused on the character of his own writing. ‘The time has come for me to look for an overall definition for my work,’ he wrote. ‘I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’
In recent years, more and more nature writers have begun to engage with the climate crisis. On the one hand, they want to raise awareness of the scale of the problem; on the other, they try to make more tangible those apocalyptic visions of the future. In Sarn Helen, Tom Bullough asks how the crisis
Pamela Anderson’s life story contains several showbiz-beauty clichés: an abusive childhood, accidental fame and many marriages. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, she didn’t grow up with the Hollywood studio system, so there were no brilliant writers and directors laid on to make her acting career memorable. But the absence of this structure
In rural Trinidad in the early 1940s, in a village on a hill, the rich rise like bread to the very top. This is where Dalton Changoor and his much younger wife Marlee live, in a mansion on a large plot of land that requires plenty of upkeep. The poor dwell at the bottom, among
‘No one dies without regrets,’ says Doctor Kaiser Shah in Mirza Waheed’s melancholy third novel, an exploration of guilt through the eyes of a doctor haunted by his past, which won the Hindu Prize for Fiction 2019 and was nominated for two further prizes in Asia. While both Waheed’s previous novels – The Collaborator, a
This book has already had an interesting life, and most readers will by now know something of its history. For any who don’t, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism was originally submitted for publication to Bloomsbury and was warmly received by them; but two months later it was indefinitely delayed, because (as the ‘email from the very top’
The musical revolution of the 1960s reverberated widely. In many countries it was given added impetus by decolonisation. Newly independent nations adopted rock and roll, usually infused with local traditions, as a signal of modernity. From Addis Ababa to Dakar to São Paulo, officials and businessmen jived and swung and caroused in nightclubs, serenaded by
Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot on this island. The grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas,
A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a
Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun,
The only thing I’m uncertain about in this uplifting and beautifully written book is its subtitle. Granted, the landscape Kapka Kassabova invokes does sound like ‘a place that struck you dumb with its majesty’, but we are not in some Shangri-La beyond the reach of mortals. The valley in question is a two-hour drive from
This is not really a history book – and even if it were, its particular charm would be better expressed by the use of an indefinite article in the title. Or perhaps ‘Histories’ might have been more appropriate. Calling things what they are, being precise, is one of the difficulties it so enjoyably demonstrates. Some
When Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer for Tinkers, he was a literary unknown who had all but abandoned hopes of his debut novel getting published until a tiny independent publisher chanced upon it. That story, about George Crosby, a dying clock- repairer who lived in Maine, heralded Harding as a great new voice, championed
A circle of shell-shocked parents in a mansion flat; a dozen toddlers gripping minute, 16th-size violins, the concentration causing them to sway like drunks; the merciless sawing of their tiny bows; and a noise of indescribable horror – ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ reconceived as the hold music for Hell. These were the group violin lessons
On 7 September 1695, the 25-ship Grand Mughal fleet was returning through the Red Sea after its annual pilgrimage to Mecca when it was attacked by five pirate ships. In the ensuing battle, the pirates’ leader, an Englishman variously known as Henry Avery, Henry Every, the King of Pirates and Long Ben, seized precious jewels