Fiction

As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer. In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of a long-gone drama creates a psychological undertow for its hero Cal McGill. As the novel opens, Cal is on the run after covertly planting arctic flowers in Scottish ministers’ gardens as a subtle protest against the administration’s environmental policy. Cal is an oceanographer, skilled in the mapping of briny mysteries, logging sinister flotsam and jetsam

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £16.99), the seventh novel, has a plot stretching from Austria in 1934 to Wormwood Scrubs in 1949, via Los Alamos and Paris. Fiction rubs shoulders with fact. There are big themes — including the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and Cold War espionage — but they are linked to individual lives, beautifully and economically described. Meret is a cellist whom we meet as a schoolgirl in prewar Vienna, and her career provides the thread that binds together the various strands of the novel. Like all the characters, she is caught

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a

River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel of a Cornish plant-hunter, Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose, sails in to Port Louis, Mauritius, two days after the Ibis, while the Anahita, belonging to Bahram Modi, a Bombay opium merchant, encounters the same storm on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Counting the cost of their voyages, characters from all three ships make their way

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors. In James’s novel, the middle-aged

An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. Jack runs a caravan park on the Isle of Wight, having sold his centuries-old Devon farm to a banker in need of a bolt-hole. His parents are dead, and more than a decade has passed since he’s last been in touch with Tom, nine years his junior. Now Tom’s gone too, blown up by an IED,

Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for him. The couple sedate the old man, reduce him to his dotage and raid his savings. Happerton also masterminds a raid on the strong-room of a City jewellers — echoes here of the jewellery raid in Taylor’s previous novel, At the Chime of a City Clock. All the while, with smug, relentless guile, he also