Fiction

China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author rarely loses sight of the delightfully mind-warping possibilities of his chosen genres. Last year’s story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, offered brief slices of imaginary futures in which icebergs floated above London streets, archaeologists hauled crystal statues from the Mediterranean earth and urban hipsters attended parties wearing the heads of butchered animals. Railsea (2012), his most recent full-length novel, was a rewrite of Moby-Dick in which steampunk adventurers roamed the deserts on locomotives hunting giant ferrets and moles; previous work has featured twin cities occupying the same geographical space

Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan. Domani (‘Tomorrow’) will never be published: a tycoon who finances it plans to use it as a blackmail tool in his shady dealings. The proposed title of the memoir, Domani: Yesterday, sets the tone for this pacy book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled detective fiction’. The new book is not so much hard-boiled as slowly poached, Heston Blumenthal style, in a sous-vide water oven, then finished on a violently hot grill. King has the popular novelist’s gifts in spades — a flawless sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, an eye for the telling detail, a no-mess-no-fuss approach to characterisation. He also has special insights into the uncanny: his frequent forays into the supernatural are wrenchingly plausible, while his rendering of ‘ordinary’ things — a face, a doorway, the hollowed-out roots of a

Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress, then tie them up and gag them with their own underwear, and set fire to the place. However, See How Small is not interested in the why or the who, but rather in the lives of a group of characters affected by the incident. We learn about these lives both before and after the murders, mostly after. This book is a kind of modern ghost story, without the frightening bits. Kate Ulrich is the mother of two of the girls. She is haunted by them. Jack Dewey is the firefighter

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print. Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien

Nadine Dorries’s novel, Four Streets, may have been unilaterally panned by the critics, with the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse labelling it the ‘the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years’, but Nadine’s first official journey into fiction has been a runaway success. It spent the last 43 days in the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon, before shooting up to number one for a week, seeing off stiff competition from that other Tory scribe Lord Archer. Four Streets is selling at a much reduced rate of 59 pence; so it’s going to take a while for publishers Head of Zeus to make up the £18,000 Nadine has declared as an advance

I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult list but I read it when I was about ten, Lovejoy’s age. She’s the heroine of this book, a small, strong-willed girl with the tenacity and determination of 20 adults. She’s got a feckless mother, no father at all, and scarcely any friends. It’s not perhaps surprising. Lovejoy is fierce and selfish because she had to learn to be tough to survive. She snatches, she steals, she’s witheringly scornful if she doesn’t like anyone. I knew as I read the book that I’d be very wary of Lovejoy in real

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch: the boyhood in suburban St Louis; Harvard and early trips to Europe; the war, Greenwich Village and the Beats; Latin America and exile in 1950s Tangier, Existential Paris, Swinging London; the return to the USA and emergence as a literary celebrity adored by Warhol. The wheels are oiled with