Struggling to survive the future
Jim Crace’s latest novel, The Pesthouse, is set in a future America which, following an unnamed catastrophe, has endured a massive regression. There are no machines any more, no electricity or shops,...
View ArticleVoodoo, rape and an apple tree
A summary of the events that take place in this novel might run as follows: a lost boy (who may be the soul of a comatose adult) walks around a hospital with an apple tree growing inconveniently in his...
View ArticleA boy lost in Africa
What is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally...
View ArticleTwo can be as bad as one
Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare Nicholas Shakespeare’s new novel is set in Wellington Point, an inauspicious fictional Tasmanian town. It is a place offering few prospects: the only jobs are...
View ArticleA yarn about yarn-spinners
In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team: What an exciting experience...
View ArticleA very English domesticity
Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse —...
View ArticleSmitten for life
Ricardo Somocurcio, the narrator of The Bad Girl, is an unambitious man whose sole wish, ever since his childhood in Peru, has been to live in Paris. He studied hard at school and, on arriving in Paris...
View ArticleNo getting away from it
Some non-fiction books seem inevitable before they are even written. Dawkins on atheism, Hitchens on contrarianism, Ackroyd on London: with such works, the author is allied so closely to the subject...
View ArticleSounds of the Seventies
One of the difficult tasks when writing fiction about the recent past is to let the reader know the approximate year in which the action is taking place without giving the impression of scene-setting....
View ArticleThe magic lingers on
At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists,...
View ArticleA boy’s own world
The pilcrow is a typographical symbol which looks like this: ¶. It was once used in writing (often of the philosophical or religious kind) to indicate a new line of discussion, before the habit of...
View ArticleThe travels of an idealist
Simon Baker reviews Andreï Makine’s latest novel In Andreï Makine’s previous novel, The Woman Who Waited (2006), which is set in 1970s USSR, the unnamed narrator sees through his peers’ weak...
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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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...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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