Fiction

For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get inside the head of someone who is 50 and hasn’t. Less is, among other things, a novel about the aches and pains of midlife, real and imagined; its hero, Arthur Less, turns 50 in the course of the book. By a happy coincidence — or one engineered by The Spectator’s literary editor — while reading Less I too marked my half-century. (Send no flowers.) Reader, I laughed and I cried; this is a hilarious, heart-warming and thoroughly midlife-enhancing book. Less is a failed novelist, or at least thinks of himself

In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote the British war effort in America. This is the inspiration behind Louise Levene’s enjoyable new novel Happy Little Bluebirds. Here, though, the assistant — Evelyn Murdoch, who was working at the Postal Censorship department in Woking — discovers that she was drafted in by mistake: HQ didn’t read her file properly and assumed she was a man (‘Red faces all round,’ a British Intelligence worker tells Evelyn when she arrives in the United States), which is one of the only moments in the narrative that feels stretched. The agent who

A very prolific and long-standing writer of short stories reveals himself. William Trevor, who died in 2016, owned up to 133 short stories in the two-volume 2009 Collected Stories, and here are ten final ones, written in his last seven years. One shy of a gross, he might have had a character put it. Reading through them, we see occasional echoes and repetitions; characteristic ways of looking at life, and of putting a story together; a slowly emerging political stance; a turn of phrase; some favourite words; a delight in sentences. The novels are splendid. The sequence from The Boarding House to Other People’s Worlds hardly misses a step, and

This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a ‘Trunk’; a ‘Crown’; some ‘Seeds’), and which unashamedly references every tree you might half-remember, from Eden to Auden (‘A culture is no better than its woods’). It revolves around various efforts to save trees, whether by seedbanks or political activism, and details the ways in which its group of protagonists becomes radicalised and willing to put their lives on the line, or even kill, to save the few remaining patches of old forest in the USA. One of these protagonists, Olivia, turns towards the forest when she has a near-death

Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla at the edge of a village close to the sea in an unnamed part of Sweden. She is a tender-hearted braggart, brilliant but unlettered, with a punning, pulling-the-rug wit. She lives as she likes — sleeping with her shoes on the pillow is something children always remember about Pippi, along with the carrot-coloured plaits at right ankles to her freckled face and her superhuman strength. Pippi burst upon the world in 1945 and her main adventures were over by 1950 — a few later books elaborated on scenes already laid

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to the historian Lisa Hilton about the latest in her series of what she calls “filthy books” — the raunchy art-world thrillers she writes as L.S. Hilton. The third in the trilogy that began with Maestra (described as “like Lee Child, but with sex instead of punching”), Ultima is out this week and concludes the story of Judith Rashleigh’s corpse-strewn progress across the international scene. Lisa tells me about why murderers might slide down bannisters, why she hates her American editors, how she came to love her sociopathic heroine, and what she learnt from Joseph Roth, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Conran. Plus, she

The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One part de Quincey, one part Burroughs, it was distinguished not just by the sustained beauty and brilliance of its prose but by what must surely rank as a strong contender for the funniest scene in a Theosophy Hall ever written. It was also highly autobiographical and, perhaps just as importantly, deliberately subversive, rejecting the questions of national identity and family that preoccupy most Indian novels that find favour in the West. Something similar might be said about Thayil’s new novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints. At once a metafictional history

The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on the longlist; one from French and one from Spanish, smarty-pants that he is. It also bears noting how many of these books have only appeared in English thanks to the perspicacity of small presses, and lists with a special interest in translated fiction. Not one of these books is on the main imprint of a

Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The Adulterants, however, talks of ‘the modern everyman… stubbornly ensconced in an adolescence that has extended well beyond his biological prime’. We thus expect a man-child, resiling from responsibility and dependent on internet porn and gaming — basically the Simon Pegg character in Shaun of the Dead. But the protagonist, Ray, is really ‘mostly’ a good guy: he mostly loves his pregnant wife Garthene, and looks forward to being a father; and the youngish couple are striving to buy ‘a horrible maisonette’ in the brutal London property market. This extended adolescence

The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish the Nationwide Festival of Light, making religious inspired protests against the so-called permissive society, she also wrote an autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is?, published by New English Library. Thus her thoughts regarding the impending moral collapse of the nation were brought to the public by the same outfit responsible for a comprehensive range of sinew-stiffening pulp fiction delights such as The Degenerates by Sandra Shulman, Bikers at War by Jan Hudson and Gang Girls by Maisie Mosco. All of these and many more are featured in this heavily

More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, which circles the globe before concluding with a long interlude in the Australian outback. While the film was in the mode of speculative science fiction and Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, this new book nonetheless shares both that earlier work’s fascination with outsiders whose lives spin off in unpredictable directions, and as a profound reverence for Australia’s interior and its people. Outside Melbourne, in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, Willie Bachhuber — a

The events of this book take place where the world of the living and the world of the dead rub shoulders. Mama, 12-year-old Jojo’s grandmother, hears the voices — singing, talking, crying — of ghosts; Leoni, Jojo’s mother, sees her brother — ‘given, that he’s been dead 15 years now’ — sitting at the table, in the car, on the sofa between her and her friend, and every time she is high; and Richie, a 12-year-old boy whom Jojo’s grandfather, Pops, knew in prison, haunts Jojo, searching for a way ‘home’. Sometimes despondent and aimless, at other times desperate and angry, the ghosts of almost exclusively black people are present