Fiction

Thursday

Anita Brookner

Last Friends, by Jane Gardam – review

Any writer who embarks on a trilogy is either extremely confident or taking something of a risk. The danger is that the reader will have forgotten the first two volumes and will have lost any memory of the story and the characters who now occupy the foreground of what might be a fairly mystifying account. So it is with Jane Gardam’s present novel which forms the conclusion to her foregoing Old Filth and The Man with the Wooden Hat, which featured Terence Veneering and Edward Feathers, lawyers and rivals not only in their professional lives but in most other matters, both trivial and significant. They’re not sympathetic characters, and time

Michael Paraskos

Whirligig, by Magnus Mcintyre – review

I do not have much time for the idea of the redemptive power of the countryside. I am not alone in this. Even theologians tend to dream of the day they enter the City of God rather than 1,000 acres of nowhere. But I will buy into a modern fairytale extolling the virtues of nature and country folk when told with wit and verve. So it is with Magnus Macintyre’s novel Whirligig. This is the story of Gordon Claypole, an English businessman who finds himself among the singular natives of a Scottish island. Or rather, an almost island. Like much in the novel nothing is clear cut. Claypole is half

Jonathan Mirsky

The Dark Road, by Ma Jian – review

If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of the startling Beijing Coma, prepared for this evocative and sometimes horrifying novel by travelling through Chinese regions few tourists see. There he encountered some of the millions of women who had just given birth to babies declared illegal by the one-child family laws, which were taken away and sold by corrupt officials to rich foreigners eager to adopt. He saw, too, the effects on the poor migrants who disassemble our unwanted televisions and computers and poison themselves by handling the

Thursday

Angela Huth

The Hive, by Gill Hornby – review

Who would have thought that the idea for a novel about mothers at the school gate would spark a frenzied bidding for world  rights? Not a subject to make the heart race, surely, but race publishers did for a first novel by Gill Hornby, whose inspiration it was. Plainly she did her research at a school gate, and her acute ear has captured every nuance of the motherly buzz that will be universally recognised. Heavens, they’re a lively lot, and how they talk — all in a language that is particular to forty-something mothers. They share a vocabulary — keenos, newbie, yikes, oops.soz, bagsy, delish. The words ping off the

Cressida Connolly

All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld – review

Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description more or less fits this second novel, although here a reticent woman takes the place of three generations of silent men. All the better: we expect men (in fiction at least) to be strong silent types, while women protagonists tend to err towards chattiness and disclosure. In this as in other regards Wyld is a writer who reconfigures the conventions of storytelling with a sure-footedness and ambition which belie her age. Even her name is good, suggesting an untamed paradise

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Writers in a state of fear

A State of Fear, Joseph Clyde’s new thriller*, stands out for many reasons. Thrillers only work if they are thrilling, and Clyde’s description of the search for the terrorist who planted a dirty bomb in central London keeps the reader fascinated. The best thrillers are more than just page-turners, however, and Clyde presents a convincing picture of what Britain could look like after law and order breaks down and the economy collapses. Like all dystopian novelists, he takes conflicts in the present and imagines how they will play out in his imagined future. Today’s sectarian divisions and the failure of Britain to deal with them, or even admit they exist,

Aime Williams

Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to

Monday

Stephen Mcewen

Tan Twan Eng interview: ‘I have no alternative but to write in English’

Tan Twan Eng’s first novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, his second was shortlisted and then won the Man Asian Literary Prize. To say that his work over the past five years has received praise and attention would be something of an understatement. Likened to Ishiguro and Ondaatje, his work explores the point at which untold personal history collides with the bellicose history of mid-twentieth century East Asia. In The Gift of Rain the elderly Philip Hutton is living out his days as a postcolonial remnant in his childhood home of Penang, with little but his memories to keep him company. These are revisited with arrival of Michiko,

Thursday

Mark Greaves

Seriously eccentric – Chaplin & Company by Mave Fellowes

Chaplin & Company is an alarming proposition for anyone with a low threshold for the cute and quirky. Its main character, Odeline Milk, is a mime artist. She is serious and eccentric. In bed she lies on her back ‘as if she has been arranged this way and told not to move’. She wears brogues several sizes too big for her feet. When we meet her, she is moving into a canal boat in London. Her mother, with whom she lived in Arundel, West Sussex, has just died. Odeline does not dwell on this. Instead she is thinking about her new life. In London, she thinks, her artistic endeavours will

Charlotte Moore

Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver – review

‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the big brother of the title, the handsome, free-wheeling, jive-talking Edison, a jazz pianist. The siblings grew up in LA, their dysfunctional family life paralleled, almost parodied, in Joint Custody, a prime-time television drama scripted by Travis Appaloosa, their smarmy, self-aggrandising father. This prolonged and subtle betrayal drives Pandora to seek anonymity in quiet Iowa, while Edison, in bohemian New York, craves public attention, and trades on his father’s fame to attain it. Edison uses the stagey ‘Appaloosa’ as his surname,

Andrew Taylor

Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor

An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, which examines the rise, fall and aftermath of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a disillusioned Berlin detective. By 1943, the tide of war is turning. Bernie, now working from the German War Crimes Bureau, is despatched to the neighbourhood of Smolensk, where a wolf has dug up human remains in the Katyn forest. Is this a mass grave of Polish officers murdered by the Russians? If so, the Wehrmacht is more than happy to conduct a

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

Cult fiction – Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

There’s an attraction, certainly, in joining a cult. Not a Sheryl Sandberg working women type cult but a good old fashioned we’re all in it together wearing hemp skirts type cult. No need to chivvy the nanny, check the Blackberry or prepare for 8am meetings. Simply pack the children off to daycare (the yard) and hoe some vegetables. That’s pretty much it for the day – apart from some worship and chatting to close female friends – until it’s time for hallucinogenic weeds and sex with a man who says he loves you. Amity & Sorrow, the debut novel for new imprint Tinder Press by Peggy Riley, explores the appeal

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The not-so-great Gatsby

You do not need to have read the book or even seen a film adaptation to feel a thrill at the word ‘Gatsby’. More than a novel, a film or a character, ‘Gatsby’ is an aspiration. The golden age of jazz, cocktails and evening dress, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is one of those works which has been subsumed and overtaken by its own myth. Such is The Great Gatsby’s enduring glamour that even the release of trailers for the latest film version (starring Leonardo di Caprio and Carey Mulligan) made news. You can see why. The film promises everything: beautiful people, luxurious locations and great clothes. After Gatsby has received

James Walton

And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini – review

The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They were carrying flaming torches in one hand and bottles of white wine in the other. It’s a joke that neatly sums up two significant facts about Hosseini’s status as a writer. First — and not to be underestimated, of course — it proves that he’s famous enough to make jokes about. But it also reminds us that his fame has been driven by ordinary book-lovers rather than literary professionals. His two previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid

Tuesday

Aime Williams

Alienation effect

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens

Thursday

Alan Judd

A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré – review

John Le Carré is one of a select group of novelists whose vivid and internally coherent imaginative worlds are so recognisable that their names have become adjectives — Dickensian, Wodehousian,  Kafka-esqe. Thus, we all know what we mean by Le Carré-esque — the shifting sands of the Cold War, its depths and shallows reflected in the moral composition of those who fought it, sinister and impersonal state interests pitted against the individual, the inevitability of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, London grey in fog and rain, the outward manifestation of the inner landscape. The Cold War is long gone, of course — at least in its more

Robert Chandler

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nikolai Leskov – review

Though underestimated in the English-speaking world, Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian writers. Donald Rayfield has described him as ‘Russia’s best-kept secret’. Richard Pevear’s excellent introduction to this selection includes Anton Chekhov’s account of how Leskov — ‘his favourite writer’ — said to him at the beginning of his career, after a night of carousing, ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David.  Write.’ This little scene, which could be from one of Leskov’s own stories, perhaps offers a clue as to why he is not more widely recognised. We don’t know whether to laugh at the story or to feel moved by it;

Anthony Cummins

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi – review

Excitement over the extraterritorial birthplace of authors on Granta’s recent list of Britain’s best young novelists must have been old news in the United States, where the New Yorker’s equivalent exercise four years ago turned up Americans from China, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Latvia, Nigeria, Peru, Russia and Serbia. Roughly speaking, this immigrant fiction makes a threefold appeal: it’s exotic, yet familiar (‘our’ culture measured by the standards of another), with a hairshirt’s prickle, too (by showing how short we fall). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel briefly features an eight-year-old Pennsylvanian boy who, before his nanny arrived from Nigeria, never knew that oranges contained pips. Americans in Americanah are inauthentic,

Rachel Redford

The Spoken Word: Short Stories, Volume II – review

Largely unheard since their original performances or BBC broadcasts between 1939 and 2011, these readings of 12 short stories by their authors are a treasure trove. * E.M.Forster’s 1948 reading definitely conjures up a past era. His philosophical debate in ‘Mr Andrews’ concerning two souls in ‘interspace’ — of a righteous Englishman and a Turk who has slain his enemy ‘whilst fighting the infidel’ — is as academic as the 70-year-old author’s voice. Similarly the irresistible opening to Osbert Sitwell’s ‘The Staggered Stay’ immediately takes us back to the Forties: ‘Miss Mumsford always put her aunt away upstairs, even in summer, before she came down to dinner…’ Sitwell’s delivery, crisp

Tuesday

Mary Hannity

Schroder – one man’s journey into night

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her