Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in
Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which
Those who remember Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel Netherland, which featured a multicultural cricket club and was set in post 9/11 Manhattan, will assume they know what they’re getting with Godwin, which purports to be about the hunt for the next Messi. A video file of an African teenager with legendary ball skills is circulating far
Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce
How do you picture the end of days? ‘When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world,’ muses the unnamed narrator in It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over. ‘I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction.’ But no: ‘The end
‘The surest and quickest way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object.’ Cesare Pavese wrote those words in Dialogues with Leucò, one of two quotations that preface Lara Pawson’s deceptively slim third book, Spent Light. When her dog starts killing squirrels, Pawson cooks them, acquiringa Whitby
If chicken soup is balm for the soul, then James McBride’s eighth book, set in 1930s Chicken Hill, a neighbourhood in a small town in Pennsylvania that is home to Jewish, black and other immigrant people, is its literary equivalent. There is something nourishing about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a warm story about
Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close
Lauren Groff writes to alleviate her angst about aspects of life she finds hard to confront. Climatic disaster, misogyny, spousal death, flawed utopias and pandemics have all fuelled the plots of books as disparate as Fates and Furies, her 2015 contemporary two-hander about marital verisimilitude, and Matrix, which features a 12th-century feminist abbess based on
All writers studying their craft should be encouraged to try translation, thinks Idra Novey, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, poet and, si, translator. Working in another language confers the freedom to slip out of their own voices, developing their own tone in the process, she told one interviewer. On the strength of Novey’s third novel, Take What
There is more than one way to read the title of Mona Simpson’s seventh novel Commitment, a multigenerational family saga set mainly in California in the 1970s and 1980s. There is the ‘hospital commitment’ Diane Aziz, a single mother of three teenage children, needs after sinking into a deep depression shortly after her eldest, Walter,
When Flavia, 28, starts seeing a sex therapist called Om – a name that is as ‘on-the-nose’ as everything in Hudson, NY, the college town without a college where Jen Beagin sets Big Swiss – she is upfront about her ground rules. Having been brutally attacked a few years earlier, she says to Om: Can
Anyone who has read Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins will want to turn straight to ‘The Angel of Rome’, the title story in this second collection by the versatile American author. Like the novel that elevated Walter from an underrated writer of police procedurals and thrillers to one capable of bestsellers, ‘The Angel of Rome’ is
It’s been two months since 14-year-old Orla’s mother died of cancer, and the girl isn’t coping. Neither is her father. While he self-medicates with booze, she plots her escape, to her aunt’s in Northern Ireland, where her mum is buried: I am sad to go but it is time now and there is no point
When Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer for Tinkers, he was a literary unknown who had all but abandoned hopes of his debut novel getting published until a tiny independent publisher chanced upon it. That story, about George Crosby, a dying clock- repairer who lived in Maine, heralded Harding as a great new voice, championed
Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she
‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,’ is how Louise Glück closes her poem ‘Nostos’. The same sentiment guides Marigold and Rose, the latest book by the 2020 Nobel Prize winner and the poet’s first to be deemed ‘a fiction’. Marigold and Rose are babies – infant twin girls in
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion that does, paving the way for a story about love, family and stories themselves, which is apt from a writer who is known for his dramas on the stage as much as on the page.
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book about 1940s Hollywood, Mussolini’s Italy and America’s entry into the second world war. The action opens in the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, a struggling film studio run by Artie and Ned Feldman, two
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for well-crafted plots exploring isolation, shame and troubled families. In Amy and Lan, she sticks with some similar themes but shakes things up by using two child narrators to tell their own stories. As the seasons
