Who did fall at the Reichenbach Falls?
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their…
View ArticleThe gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau.…
View ArticleLambs to the slaughter
US military personnel remove bags containing bodies of members of the Jim Jones' sect "Temple of people", 23 November 1978, after they arrived from Jonestown, the community's cultural center, where Jim...
View ArticleGeorgian romp
London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young…
View ArticleParadise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
View ArticleNovel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel…
View ArticleFriendships resurrected
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years,…
View ArticleThe man who came to dinner
Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of…
View ArticleBOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter
Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her…
View ArticleThe loneliness of the long distance salesman
If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the…
View ArticleWho did fall at the Reichenbach Falls?
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their teens, tend to notice an endearing vagueness on the part of Sir Arthur...
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Just the bare bones
It is impossible (as I prove in this sentence) to review Philip Roth without mentioning the surge of creativity that began when the author was around 60 and which now sees him publishing a novel every...
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The ex factor
At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked, seems too close to that of his first novel, High Fidelity (1995). At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked, seems too...
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Past imperfect
We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more...
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One out of five
Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with...
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Dark fantasies
Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his...
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A choice of first novels
A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz Pollard, by Laura Beatty Chatto & Windus Inside the Whale, by Jennie Rooney Chatto & Windus Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight Doubleday AFraction...
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A furious, frazzled youth
Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the...
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Deceit and dilemma
Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between...
View ArticleAnother tragic Russian heroine
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers,...
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