Obsession

‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods. The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father, Rowan Anderson, who spends most of his time in London, writing a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton and feuding with his possessive girlfriend, Gloria. He periodically visits his daughter and his wife, Cressida, in their country cottage. Cressida busies herself with domestic chores in the cramped space, compulsively ironing sheets, painstakingly preparing elaborate meals

London in the long hot summer of 1914. A city of gold sovereigns, chaperones and muffin men, but also a place where war looms, paranoia breeds and secret papers mysteriously disappear. The world that Robert Harris brings to life in Precipice is both close to that of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and simultaneously very far away. In place of rugged heroes giving dastardly spies what for, he offers a subtle drama about the distasteful and ultimately destructive love affair between a young aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, and a man 35 years her senior who, not coincidentally, happens to be the prime minister H.H. Asquith. When the book opens, a few days

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how

Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London flat where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident – poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humour (Max notes his ‘strong urge to file a complaint’ about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events. As the book progresses, Wyld alternates sections from Max’s perspective, entitled ‘After’, with others: ‘Before’, Hannah’s perspective on

Should Alain de Botton ever require fictional evidence of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, he could do worse than to turn to Clara, the protagonist of Stéphane Carlier’s latest delightful novel. Clara is a hairdresser in a rather rundown provincial salon in France. She has a good relationship with her boss, Madame Habib, her colleagues, Nolwenn and Patrick, and her loyal clientele, and a more vexed one with JB, her boyfriend of three years, a muscular firefighter who resembles Flynn Ryder in the Disney cartoon.  One day, a mysterious stranger comes to the salon. He barely speaks while Clara is cutting his hair and leaves her no tip, but

Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943. Had his archive not been destroyed, we might find him on the same shelf as Vladimir Nabokov, Vladislav Khodasevich and Ivan Bunin – the glittering Russian literati of 1930s Paris – and Georgy Adamovich, who said that Felsen’s prose ‘left behind a light for which there is no name’. With this new translation of the 1930 novel Deceit, that light has been brought back from dim obscurity. In this first of three novels Felsen published, we follow the unnamed narrator’s tortured obsession with the ‘unequivocally irresistible’ Lyolya Heard, who drifts